


the other half is me

by focusfixated



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Collars, D/s themes, Discussion of Mental Health, Identity Porn, Kink Negotiation, M/M, Praise Kink, Richie Tozier submits to the mortifying ordeal of asking for what he wants, Sex as character exploration, Sexual Fantasy, Therapy Mention, Under-negotiated Kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-17
Updated: 2020-06-06
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:01:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 25,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24231754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/focusfixated/pseuds/focusfixated
Summary: “I just—” Richie realised he’d been shouting and dropped his voice, suddenly. “Didn’t your therapist fix all your sex problems?”“Oh my God.” Eddie rubbed a hand over his furrowed brow. “Fixed is a stretch but it’s super nice of you to assume I’m the stable one in this relationship.”or: When you're an ex-closeted gay man in his forties recovering from a twenty-seven-year void of intimacy and enough trauma to last a lifetime, asking for what you want isn't something that happens overnight.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 123
Kudos: 787





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> sometimes richie tozier getting to live out his fantasy of wearing a collar despite his fears and anxieties about what it all means is something that can actually be so personal. 
> 
> warnings: this touches on richie's possible undiagnosed ADHD and some of the issues he's internalised because of it. i'll post any relevant warnings on later chapters as we go along. 
> 
> [update]: this story is now complete. also, for anyone who might be re-reading this a couple of months on, i was never really happy with the opening section of this story from a writing POV, and it only just hit me how to rework it, so you might notice a couple of rewritten paragraphs. the plot beats and aim of the opening are pretty much exactly the same, though. 
> 
> all the love and gratitude in the world to [koritsimou](https://archiveofourown.org/users/koritsimou/pseuds/koritsimou) who dragged me down into this sewer in the first place. 
> 
> this is set in post chapter 2-era canon, minus any deaths.

When Bill said to Eddie, “Jesus, Eddie, put Trashmouth back on his leash,” in front of everyone at a black-tie charity fundraising event they had all travelled to New York for on Beverly’s invitation, he regretted it as soon as the words left his mouth.

Richie’s nonstop commentary about the celebrity beneficiaries and his drunk impressions of them wasn't out of the ordinary for Richie at an open bar, but Bill was a month into a stubborn writing block on the sequel to his novel, Black Fang (Richie had dubbed the work-in-progress _2 Black 2 Fangulous,_ and was refusing to refer to it in conversation by any other name) so his tolerance was more frayed than usual.

The problem was that there was clearly something going on between Richie and Eddie, something quiet and personal that had bloomed in the aftermath of Niebolt, Eddie's recovery, and the battleground of his divorce proceedings. Bev had noticed it first, and they'd all come to a polite, unspoken agreement not to comment on it. The problem was that Richie Tozier was biologically wired to make loud, sordid comments on anything remotely sexual in nature, a _that's what she said_ compulsion he'd never grown out of. The problem _was_ that Bill's comment had placed Richie in a catch-22 where a sex joke would be too awkward in its proximity to the truth, but not saying anything would be weirder, and in both instances it would be an acknowledgement of the relationship that everyone had been pretending very hard not to notice.

There was an uncomfortable silence. Richie and Eddie's stillness was painfully conspicuous, and everyone else exchanged intensely silent glances so panicked it was almost comical.

“Ooh, _amuse-bouches_ ,” Beverly said loudly to a passing waitress.

“I’d like to amuse _her_ bouche,” Richie tried.

“Beep beep,” said Ben.

\---

“So, when do we acknowledge that everybody knows what's going on and there’s no point keeping it a secret anymore, and how long do we keep up the pretence anyway just for the fun and fuckery?” Richie asked, hanging his leather jacket on the empty hook not taken up by Eddie’s green polyester aviator jacket, which Richie insisted was an eyesore and an affront to both God and fashion, but Eddie had insisted was classy because it cost an entire rent-cheque’s worth of dollars.

Eddie was crouched over in the apartment hallway, unlacing his pristine, patent leather dress shoes. “We're not doing this for the fun _or_ the fuckery.”

“I dunno. Think of all the hilarious sitcom gags we could really lean into," Richie said, as he toed off his bright red Chucks. “Next time we're about to get caught you could climb out the window at the last minute and end up locked out naked on the fire escape.”

Eddie tucked his shoes onto the shoe rack, because he was the kind of person that owned one, and said, “Please give me one example where that gag has actually been funny.”

Richie's face took on an offended look. “The screwball comedy is an enduring genre. Millions of American dollars went into making them for decades.”

“Well, millions of Americans dollars went to waste,” Eddie said, as he grabbed at the knot of his tie and tried to loosen it.

“My heart bleeds for Cary Grant.” Richie turned to put his hands on Eddie’s shoulders. “Remind me to add _His Girl Friday_ to the list of 'classic films Eddie has never seen because he has fucking bad taste in comedy'.”

“And somehow I still think _you’re_ funny,” Eddie said. “Talk about bad taste.” But it was half-hearted, like he was too tired to joke. He sighed and pressed his face into Richie’s chest. “Sorry if it was weird with everyone tonight.”

“Hey, it's fine, I didn't mind.” Richie put his hands on the back of Eddie’s neck, but with a little noise Eddie reached up and rearranged them so that Richie’s arms went all the way around his back and shoulders. Richie smiled and kissed the top of Eddie’s head. “Did you see Bill’s face when he said – when he said that thing. About the leash. Did you see it? He went bright red, like a little tomato with a bald patch.”

Eddie pulled back. “I didn't like that, actually.”

Richie stopped grinning. “No?”

“I don't think – I don’t want you to think you need to be reigned in or controlled every time you get all—” Eddie made a flapping hand gesture, that Richie took to mean _like you do._ “Like you need to be – taken down a peg, or whatever.” Eddie had gone kind of red, and Richie was momentarily distracted by the way the flush went to the tips of Eddie’s ears. He pinched them, just because he could, and Eddie batted him away. “I mean, I could do with a lot less mom jokes around important celebrity benefactors donating money to a women’s charity for domestic abuse, _jesus christ_ , but – I don’t want you to feel like you can’t be yourself in front of people. I like you the way you are.”

Richie pulled Eddie in close. There was a warm, melting feeling in his chest, like butter pooling on hot, charred toast, burnt black the way he liked it, even though Eddie always insisted the blacker the toast the higher the carcinogens. “I get what you’re saying. You’re saying you don’t want me to _go changin'. To try and please you. I've never let you down before. Mmm-hmmm._ ”

Eddie stuck a finger up against Richie’s lips. “Don't start.”

“I thought you said I didn't need to be reigned in or controlled.”

“I'm not controlling you. I'm giving you a choice. You can stay down here and sing Billy Joel songs at the wallpaper or you can come upstairs and fuck me. The decision you make is totally your own.”

Richie held up two fingers. “In that case I'll take option number two, please.”

“Excellent choice.”

Richie looked Eddie over appreciatively as he walked away. He didn’t think Eddie did it on purpose, being this _sexy_ all the time – and maybe it was just because Richie was a fuck-brained loser and completely stupid over this unbearably attractive shithead in unconscionably expensive Gucci loafers, but there was something alluring in the way Eddie looked over his shoulder at Richie, impatient, expectant.

Richie had spent a lot of his life deliberately letting people down or else proving them wrong on purpose, carefully cultivating a total lack of expectation from anybody either way, but now – now he found he kind of liked being _expected_.

“I'll be there,” he said, and his heart was expansive and warm in his chest. 

\---

The thing was, for all that Eddie was the stubborn asshole when it came to petty arguments, sinking his bull-terrier teeth into _I’m right and you’re definitely wrong, here’s at least twelve reasons why_ , Richie was actually the one who found it hardest to let go of things; persistent mental images, catchy song lyrics, stupid comments that bounced repeatedly off the edges of his head like an old Windows ‘98 screensaver until he blurted them out at inopportune moments.

Sometimes it was the jingle from an advert he’d heard thirty thousand times on the radio as a kid that rattled about in there. Sometimes it was a tweet he’d read from a gen-Z fan of his that used internet slang he didn’t understand and didn’t want to google but seemed somehow melodic in its mystery, repeating over and over in his mind. And sometimes it was an off-the-cuff comment from one of his best friends in a moment of impatience intended to be immediately forgotten.

 _Put him back on his leash_. Richie kept gnawing on those words. They hovered, somewhere between his brain and that subvocal place in his mouth that felt claggy with unsaid things, like cerebral peanut butter stuck to his palate.

Richie minimised the document he was working in. The good thing about ostensibly working from home on half-drafted new stand-up material while Eddie went out and worked a solid nine-to-five in the city, was that Eddie wasn’t there to peer concernedly and put the back of his hand to Richie’s sweaty forehead to check if he had a temperature when Richie was actually just working himself up into a state of awkward arousal from his gormless daydreaming in front of his computer.

Embarrassed, but with no one there but God and his subconscious to judge him, Richie opened a new incognito tab. His fingers hovered over the keyboard. He had a notion in his mind, but no real idea what to search for. _Sex collars? Leashes for people?_ The thought made him laugh kind of hysterically to himself. It sounded so fucking stupid. He decided to start instead with a careful, cursory browse through _fetish gear,_ but that mostly brought up images of voluptuous women in latex, pouting in various states of strappy bondage (including some more hardcore stuff that looked like rubber body-bags with strategic holes cut out of them which made Richie say _oh no_ out loud.)

Richie paused his scrolling, feeling worked-up and jittery. He resisted glancing guiltily over his shoulder – barely – and added _gay_ to the search term, then hastily squeezed his eyes shut as he hit _enter_.

When he squinched an eye back open, the website that had come up had a picture in its header of two men entwined together. Both of them were white, both jacked, with shaved heads and hairless chests, muscles gleaming in unison, so identically Aryan they might have been twins. It was a little creepy, but Richie didn’t have time to unpack the problematic elements of body image in gay culture, because his conscious brain had gone completely offline at the sight of one of the men, eyes closed, on all fours, tendons straining in his neck as the other guy pulled at him from behind with a leather strap clipped to a thick, studded collar.

Richie suddenly felt extremely hot all over, and immediately closed the tab in a panic. He shut his laptop, almost fell over standing up, and grabbed his jacket to leave the apartment.

As he walked round the block, Richie found himself biting the cold-chapped crack of his lips over and over. He couldn’t stop it, that _image_ , shaping up and sharpening the more he poked at it, like he was rubbing it over a whetstone; the collar, the leash, the look on the man’s face – except he was imagining the leather around his own neck, and the long strap was wound around Eddie’s arm, tight and demanding. The problem was – apart from Richie never having considered himself any more sexually adventurous than a deeply-closeted gay man in his forties with a twenty-seven-year void of intimacy and a total lack of experimentation in his sexual history could be expected to be – that Richie wasn’t entirely sure it was _okay_ , this sudden prurient interest in being yanked around by the neck. It was all very woke and 21st century to accept your sexual proclivities these days, but Richie wasn’t sure that getting a boner over something weird necessarily absolved you of being a pervert. If anything, it felt like it made it worse.

After half an hour of agitated wandering, Richie made his way back to Eddie’s apartment. _Their_ apartment. It was half the size of Richie’s old three-bedroom, floor-to-ceiling glass-windowed bachelor pad back in LA, and Eddie was paying out the ass for it, but financial risk analysis for big businesses in New York paid big bucks, and with a comedy special on the horizon, Richie wasn’t exactly strapped for cash either. Also, they slept in the same bed – and wasn’t _that_ something Richie still wasn’t used to being allowed to say – so one bedroom was enough.

Inside, Richie kicked his shoes off, tripped over the peace lily in the faux-antique vase in the corner of the hallway, and swore loudly as he banged his knee on the low table that had a dish for keys and coins on it and which Eddie insisted on calling _the telephone table_ even though no one under the age of seventy-five had a phone that lived anywhere except the back pocket of their pants any more.

“You ok?” Eddie called from inside the flat, and Richie swore again as he jumped in surprise.

“When did you get back?”

“Like forty-two seconds ago.” Eddie poked his head into the hallway. He’d taken his jacket and shoes off, and had unbuttoned the top two buttons of his white shirt. “You hungry?” Eddie tugged his tie so that it slipped out from under his collar, and then – the universe casually throwing in a big cosmic coincidence specifically engineered to make Richie question his sanity – carefully wound it tight around his fist.

“Uh,” Richie replied, dumbly.

“You want Thai?”

Richie didn’t answer. He just took the two long strides that brought him over to where Eddie stood, and slid his hands over his waist, drawing him in close, kissing him hard. It was a messy kiss, misdirected, blurry and clacking with teeth and Richie’s skewed glasses, but Richie had been low-grade turned on for the entire afternoon and he was past the coherent point of being able to help himself, not with the mental images that kept banging round his head, and Eddie’s tie wrapped around his hand like that.

“Oh right,” Eddie said, and then bit down hard on Richie’s bottom lip, tugging it between his teeth. It was the kind of thing that made Richie absolutely weak in the knees and half-hard before anyone even went near his dick, and Eddie knew it, which was why he kept doing it.

In a clumsy, meandering strip-tease back towards their bedroom, Richie hustled Eddie in through the door, stumbling and peeling off socks and shirts and underwear until the back of Eddie’s knees hit the edge of the bed, and he fell sitting, legs apart, shirt and tie abandoned but his pants still on.

“Fuck,” Richie said. He’d lost all his own clothes, and usually wasn’t that fond of being bare-assed in all his hairy, soft-bellied glory while Eddie still had the modesty of pants on, and a hard-sculpted chest gleaming in the low bedroom light that wasn’t half as forgiving on Richie’s own. But Eddie was giving him a look, hungry and desperate, and Richie decided now wasn’t the time for self-consciousness – now was the time for sucking Eddie’s dick. “I’m going to suck your dick,” he said.

“Be my fucking guest,” Eddie said, breathily, and dropped his head back in a moan when Richie went to his knees – they ached and cricked as he went, but Richie had denied himself any and all dick-sucking for most of the prime years of his life, and he’d be damned if he was going to let his stupid joints get in the way, now he had a ready and willing dick at his beck and call whenever he wanted it.

Richie drew Eddie out of his pants, and Eddie’s toes curled in the carpet with a whimper. The sight of his bare toes, somehow, made Richie feel kind of crazy, and before he could do something weird like put them in his mouth and lick them, Richie buried his face in the space between Eddie’s thighs and slid home.

“God – _fuck_ yes,” Eddie groaned, and he shuddered hard, hands going up to grip Richie’s shoulders. His dick was only halfway there, but Richie sucked hard, head bobbing, tongue wide and flat, getting it thick and hard in his mouth, making the kind of messy noises he knew spurred Eddie on – Eddie, who insisted on moving tables at a restaurant once because a woman close to them had been chewing with her mouth open, but who seemed to like it when Richie slurped and gagged on his dick in the loudest, dirtiest way possible.

“Fuck, _fuck_ , Richie,” Eddie gasped, and Richie could feel the tension vibrating off him as he struggled to keep still. It was good, driving Eddie mad like this, winding him up until he gave in – and usually it was enough for Richie to watch him, coiled tighter than a copper wire, getting to that point where he uncurled, overcome and awash with pleasure, his little gasps and broken moans more than enough to send Richie over the edge after him.

But something wasn’t doing it for Richie tonight, despite the way Eddie had started thrusting, his control slowly splintering apart, swollen wet cockhead nudging into the back of Richie’s throat. It was the persistence of that fucking image, the one Richie had been turning around in his head all day, dazedly wondering how it would feel, what it would _do_ to him, if he had it for real. He was chasing it desperately; an unknown horizon that was approaching, but hovered just out of reach.

He pulled off with a hard suck. His lips felt raw, and there was the taste of salt on his tongue. “Can you—” he started, then coughed. “Can you, uh.”

“What?” Eddie said, dimly. His hair was stood all askew from where he’d run his own hands through it, and he looked glaze-eyed.

“Can you – kind of, hold my head a bit. Like, here.” And Richie reached up to peel off Eddie’s fingers, that were dug deep into the sinew of his shoulders, and placed them on the back of his head instead.

“Right.” Eddie blinked. “You want me to just hold on, or…?” He trailed off, blushing.

“Whatever you want,” Richie answered quickly, not letting himself think about it more than that, and then dove back in.

“God,” Eddie said, and his fingers flexed on the back of Richie’s head. They felt hesitant, there, for a moment, but as Richie sucked in earnest, they wound down to bury deep in Richie’s hair, the grip forming a tight, sharp pressure on his scalp, and Richie moaned. “Good?” Eddie whispered, and he tugged harder, pulling Richie almost all the way off his dick before he dragged him back in, fucking up into his mouth. “You like that?” And Richie might have laughed for how fucking porno-cheesy it sounded, if it hadn’t actually made him whimper embarrassingly loudly, nodding stiffly around Eddie’s dick in his mouth. “You like that, baby?”

 _Oh God_ , Richie thought. He was already weak for Eddie’s endearments at the best of times, even when – or maybe especially when – they were fondly preceded by other terms like _you dumb fuckin asshole_ and _you big shit-for-brains sasquatch motherfucker_ , but there was something in the way Eddie said it now, _baby_ , low and soft, that short-circuited the last intelligent parts of Richie’s brain, and he let out a muffled, desperate moan, so turned-on it almost hurt.

“Yeah,” Eddie groaned, and he thrust up again, hands keeping Richie in place. “God – feels so good, you make me feel so good, Richie, I’m so – so close.”

Richie sucked harder, desperate, wet and sloppy, and then, with a shout, Eddie came loudly down his throat.

“Holy shit,” Eddie said, after a moment, panting, chest flushed. His dick was shiny-wet and twitching. “Richie, that was—”

“Eddie,” Richie said, and he felt himself shivering all over, chilled in the air that breezed from the cracked-open window, cooling the sweat that had bloomed hotly all over his skin. His dick was aching, untouched between his legs, and he was losing the feeling in his feet where all the blood supply had been cut off. His mouth felt raw, used, and there was a stinging, tingling feeling still in his scalp.

“What?” Eddie said, and then looked down, at Richie’s dick, flushed red and leaking, his hands, unmoving, digging into his thighs, and then he said, “Oh,” quietly, in a way that made Richie feel weird and embarrassed to the prickliest, most twisted inner part of himself, but still he said nothing, did nothing, until Eddie said, uncertainly, “Richie, you can – you can come, now.”

Without saying a word, Richie grabbed his dick and within seconds he was bucking and coming hard all over his fist, collapsing forward with his sweaty forehead against Eddie’s still-clad knees.

Eddie put his hand on the back of Richie’s head. They sat for a moment in a thick, still silence, until Eddie patted him awkwardly and said, “Come on. Let’s get dinner.”

\---

When Eddie and Richie started sleeping together, there’d been a certain amount of shyness between them, at first. Some of it was down to standard nerves at entering a new relationship, but some of it was also the weirdness of the awkward adolescent memories they both carried of each other from a past sexual awakening that had been abruptly aborted when their minds got the Pennywise windex-treatment. Things between them hadn’t ever been able to grow, or develop, so it was all extremely, strangely _new_.

On Richie’s part, there was also the fact that he had this persistent, overhanging feeling that there was some kind of omnipresent, watchful eye peering into his bedroom and what he was doing in it, ready to judge him and laugh at him for looking weird, for doing it wrong, for embarrassing himself. And for Eddie, it had been the fact that the reaches of his physical potential had been largely unexplored, and the idea of there being an incalculable risk associated with his body’s capability for sensations outside of his control was, for the first couple of months of their relationship, more than he could bear. It had taken several months of therapy, of gradual opening up, and of baby-step experimentation for Eddie to even let Richie get his dick near him.

There was also the entire fucking minefield of clown-related trauma to contend with. Once, Richie had been going to town sucking Eddie’s dick on the couch, when the TV, still on in the background, had played an ad for one of those water balloon-filling machines, complete with exploding, popping sounds and children screaming happily. Richie, whose gag reflex was on a hair-trigger at the best of times, had only narrowly avoided barfing on Eddie’s dick by grabbing the decorative trinket dish that was on the coffee table and heaving directly into that. Having to wash vomit out of the grooves of antique bronze-effect curlicue, naked and embarrassed in Eddie’s kitchen, was a low fucking point in their early relationship.

They were okay now, though. Richie had put a firm lid on the whispering, sabotaging voices in his head, and Eddie had discovered the consummate joy of Richie’s dick in his ass. The ongoing trauma was a less easy fix, but jeopardising the balance they’d found together would be the stupidest thing on a long list of stupid things Richie had done in his life, so he tried to act as normal as he could, to keep things easy and steady, to hold on to their happiness exactly as it was.

It was already more happiness than Richie had ever thought he would get in his whole lifetime. He didn’t really need anything else.

\---

It was a slow, Sunday morning, and Eddie had forgone his early run in favor of staying in bed – though he’d somewhat compromised the sanctity of the Sunday morning lie-in by getting up, making breakfast, getting coffee, brushing his teeth, washing his ass, kicking Richie out of bed to also make him brush his teeth, and only then allowing both of them to get back under the covers to lazily make out, trading kisses and handsy touches under the covers, tangled and sweet with soap-smell and cinnamon.

Eddie liked touching a lot, letting his hands lead and his mouth follow, mapping out pathways up Richie’s belly, chest, and neck, alternating between kisses and sharp little bites whenever he came to a particularly satisfying bit of Richie’s body, soft-sunk flesh and protruding collarbones. And Richie liked what Eddie liked, so he was perfectly happy to let Eddie roam and graze all over him like some kind of small, sexy sheep.

“You’re like a small – _ah_ – sexy sheep,” Richie said, with a little shocked hiccup in the middle of his sentence as Eddie’s teeth closed over a nipple, his other hand tugging none-too-gently at the thicket of hair on his chest.

Eddie cast his eyes up, unimpressed. Richie tried to cock his head in a way that from Eddie’s vantage point meant he wasn’t looking directly at Richie’s concertinaed double-chins.

“Stop it,” Eddie said.

“Stop what?”

“Trying to un-double your chin. As if I haven’t seen you from down under here like a hundred times.”

“Fancy going down under again?” Richie said, in a twangy, nasal accent.

“Not if you do the Australian.”

Richie mimed zipping his mouth. “And Bruce has left the building.”

With a scoff, Eddie climbed up Richie’s body, letting his lean, wiry limbs rub up against Richie’s trunk-thick ones, a slight clamminess of sweat sticking their skin together. He kissed Richie’s chin, then his top lip, then tongued Richie’s mouth open with an enthusiastic insistence that made Richie feel hot all over – the feeling of being wanted like this, so keenly, was, embarrassingly, sometimes more than enough for him.

“What do you want?” Richie asked, into Eddie’s mouth, which was minty-fresh. His teeth were smooth where Richie licked them.

Eddie had started to grind against Richie’s thigh, hard now too, making sighing noises, arms wrapping around Richie’s chest, slipping under his armpits. “Fuck me,” Eddie mumbled, breaking off to kiss wetly into Richie’s neck. “Make it slow. I wanna feel it.”

“Fuck, yes,” Richie said, feeling a hard, liquid swoop low in his belly.

Kissing as they moved, Richie turned them over to get Eddie onto his back. Richie had found that Eddie liked it when Richie used his size to hold him, envelop him, to keep him close and tight. Eddie liked it best when they were skin to skin from chest to thighs, no space in between, Richie’s arms around his back, legs folded around Richie’s hips, rocking them together, wave after wave of pleasure rolling through them both.

“C’mon, Rich,” Eddie said, pawing at Richie’s back like a cat that demanded petting. “I really want it.”

“Yeah,” Richie said, thickly. Eddie’s ability to vocalise what he wanted, at least until he got too far gone to do anything more than moan and whine, was something that filled Richie with a hot, soft pleasure. If there was any other feeling there – a prickling kind of envy – he pushed it firmly out of the way.

He lifted one of Eddie’s legs up to hook over his shoulder. With the other hand he scrabbled around in his bedside drawer for the bottle of lube, uncapped it, and squeezed it onto his fingers in one dexterous motion which Eddie didn’t notice, because he had his arm over his face, neck arched and Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed, waiting.

Rubbing two fingers together to warm the lube a little, Richie slipped down the crack of Eddie’s ass to circle his hole, following the gasping, stuttering sounds Eddie made as guidance for when to push in or pull back. When Eddie started whining continuously, body flexing and rolling as he tried to fuck himself down onto Richie’s hand, Richie pulled away.

“You good, Eds?” he asked.

Eddie blinked his eyes open, gluey and soft in the sudden light as he dropped his arm away. “Yeah,” he said, breathless. “Get to it.”

Richie used his clean hand to roll on a condom, then wiped his sticky hand on a tissue so that Eddie wouldn’t bitch at him about getting lube in his leg hair. Eddie was under him, breathing heavy, chest pink, lips parted, legs spread, waiting – he was a fucking dream, and Richie couldn’t believe he was allowed to touch. Feeling a tingle in his nose from an embarrassing onset of potential weepiness, Richie wrinkled his face, sniffed, and concentrated on lining up his cock, flushed red and thick, to press up, and push in.

“God, yes,” Eddie sighed, like he always did, like something was righting itself, settling in, shifting into place, Richie’s cock slipping slow and deep into him, like it belonged there. For Richie’s part, he couldn’t think of a place he’d prefer his cock to go than inside Eddie, in that steel-soft clench of heat. “Move, then,” Eddie reminded him, after a moment, because Richie was too busy just lying there looking tenderly into his eyes.

“Right.” Richie huffed a soft laugh, and his breath fluttered Eddie’s hair, dark and soft on top, but dampening at his temples. He thrust in, rolling his hips carefully, slow like Eddie wanted, pulling out, almost all the way, letting the rubbery head of his cock catch on Eddie’s hot, slick rim, before sliding back in, inch by inch.

“Oh, _oh_ , Jesus,” Eddie said, rolling his hips up to meet Richie. “Yes, God.”

Sweat was blooming on Richie’s brow from the effort of holding himself up on his elbows, and he let his head drop into Eddie’s neck. Eddie’s cock was hard and leaking and lay in a stiff line against Richie’s belly, rubbing slick with every thrust. He could feel it against himself as he moved. It made him kind of crazy, and he rubbed up against it harder.

“Good?” Richie said, into Eddie’s neck, grinding his hips, holding Eddie tight to him, keeping them cleaved together in an undulating line of heat and tenderness. “Is that good for you?”

“Christ,” Eddie gritted out, the word sharp on an exhale. “So fucking good.” His hands smoothed down the damp-wet planes of Richie’s back, following the divots of his spine, until his hands came to grip firm on Richie’s ass, digging in. And then, suddenly, he gave him a short, sharp smack and said, almost regretfully, “Get up, I want to try something.”

“Huh?” Richie said.

“Get up.”

Richie blinked, liquid-brained, hefting himself up to his elbows. Eddie was still clenched around him, and his chest was flushed red. “Is it – do you not like—?”

“No, _ah_ , God,” Eddie said, and his breath hitched as Richie pulled back. “I just want to try something different.”

Confused, feeling strangely anxious and not helped along by the sudden rabbiting ramp-up of his heartbeat, Richie pulled out, shifting back to sit his ass back on his bended knees. “Okay.”

“Get on your back.”

Richie did as he was told. He could feel a flush rising up him all the way from his toes to the ends of his fucking ears. “Now what?” he said, loudly, hoping Eddie hadn’t noticed how red he’d gone.

“Now, shut up for a second and let me think,” Eddie said, and Richie breathed out. Eddie was staring down at him like he was trying to solve a puzzle, observing the length and breadth of him, calculating leverage and distance and mass.

“It’s right there.”

“What?”

“My dick,” Richie said, gesturing helpfully. “In case you were looking for it.”

With a withering look, Eddie scooched forward, so that he was sitting astride Richie’s hips, just below his belly, ass nudging up against Richie’s cock. “Stop talking,” he said roughly.

Richie snapped his teeth closed so fast behind his lips there was an audible click.

“Now,” Eddie said, and there was a tremor to his voice, whether from being turned on, or from nerves, Richie didn’t know. Eddie’s cock was still right there, hard and flushed and swaying heavy, but his mouth was pinched at the corners, and he was frowning cartoonishly hard in concentration. “Put your – hands above your head. And hold onto them. Like – join your hands together.”

Slowly, for once incapable of breaking the building tension with a stupid comment, Richie did as he was told. He must have looked ridiculous, if he’d been able to look down at himself, like a big, hairy, felled tree, lying flat-prone on his back, arms above his head, hands clasped like he was cheering. But he didn’t feel ridiculous. He felt hot, turned on, prickly with a pins-and-needles buzz, little filaments alighting all across his nerves.

“God,” Eddie said, breathing out. “Your _arms_. You look so good like that.” And then, determinedly, like he was psyching himself up, “Now don’t move from there, okay? Don’t move, don’t touch, just – _stay_.”

“Fuck yes,” Richie blurted out, and then felt his face go so red he was sure the heat of it was radiating off him. His dick twitched, and Richie knew Eddie would be able to feel it, nudging up against his ass.

“And shush,” Eddie added, terse and prim, like a librarian, and Richie almost laughed, wildly, but then Eddie was reaching behind himself to grab Richie’s cock at the root, and was guiding it, carefully, to where his ass was still open and stretched, slipping down slowly with short, sharp, grunting noises, until he bottomed out, seated snugly on Richie’s hips.

“Jesus,” Richie gasped, unable to help himself as Eddie rocked, tentatively.

“Ow,” Eddie groaned, then lifted up, and slowly slid back down. “Ow, ow – _oh_ , fuck. Okay. Oh, God, yes, okay.”

“Okay?” Richie repeated, and he went to touch Eddie’s thighs, tentative.

“Hands,” Eddie snapped, punctuated by his ass slapping down against Richie as he began to fuck himself on Richie’s cock.

Richie quickly wound his hands back up over his head, knuckles clenched white. It wasn’t – he couldn’t – he didn’t know what to _do_ , where to direct his attention. His eyes were taking in the visual stimulus, Eddie with sweat pooled in his sharp collarbones, abs stretched lean and taut with every undulating movement, hands clenched hard around the top of Richie’s thighs, head thrown back and gasping, cock bobbing in the air. But Richie couldn’t touch, couldn’t feel where Eddie was hard, couldn’t run his hands across the hot, compact shape of him, and he couldn’t grind, or thrust, or fuck up into Eddie’s tight heat. He was pinned, like a spread-eagled butterfly on a corkboard, every sensation in his body out of his control, drawn out of him like a rushing, flooded stream.

“Eddie,” Richie gasped out. “I’m—”

“Don’t come yet,” Eddie said, sternly, though it was strained as he arched and rocked. “Can you – you think you can hold on?”

“I – I don’t know, Eds, I dunno, I—” Richie babbled, hands flexing above his head. He felt strangely frightened, tense, on edge. “I – _fuck_ , I can try?”

“Good,” Eddie said, in a voice so warm it washed over Richie like a sudden glow of sunshine. It almost made Richie want to fucking cry with how good it felt, and he bit his lip against the effort to stop himself.

And then Eddie let go of Richie’s thighs and put one hand on Richie’s chest instead, and one on his own dick, and then with a gasping, broken noise, he started jerking himself off, fucking up into his fist and back down onto Richie’s cock at his own erratic speed, while Richie – dumb, overwhelmed, aching – just lay there and took it.

It only took a few moments for Eddie to moan out, “God, _God_ , Richie, _yes_ ,” and then he was clenching and spilling over his knuckles, bent forward in shock and pleasure, his load pooling hotly on Richie’s belly.

Richie was writhing, now, muscles in his thighs and ass clenching with effort, burning up, his skin alight. “Eddie,” he choked.

“Yeah,” Eddie said, blurrily, and he put his hand, the one covered in his come, on Richie’s chest, and the hot-wet dirty feeling was almost more than Richie could take. “That was so good, Richie. You wanna come?”

“Yes, yes, please, _please_ Eddie,” Richie sobbed out, feeling hot and delirious, feeling like he was going to burst.

“Yeah, come on then, come for me,” Eddie murmured, and without needing to be told twice, Richie felt the edges of his vision white out, a shout ripped from him as he bucked and hollered, jack-knifing into Eddie, who grabbed hold of his shoulders to hold on and ride him out.

Richie’s breath came out loud in the come-down. Eddie was laying down on him, chest to sticky chest, legs still astride his hips, Richie’s softening cock still half in his ass.

“Well, fuck,” Richie said, shakily, after a moment.

“Yeah.” Eddie leaned up with a groan. “Holy shit, my thighs.”

“Not enough squats at the gym, you felt the need to squat on my dick, too?” Richie laughed, tremblingly, but it came out uncertain, weird-sounding, so he crossed his arms over his face, hoping Eddie would slip off for a shower or something, and let Richie lie there and fucking process his shit.

“Hey, Rich?”

“What?”

“You all good in there?”

“Yeah.” Richie peeked through the space between his own elbows. “You?”

“Fuck yeah.” Eddie lifted his hips with a hiss, letting Richie’s dick come free, then he helpfully pulled off the condom, tied it up and pitched it into the bin by their bedside. He settled back in, cross-legged at Richie’s side and was quiet a moment. “Intense though, right?”

“A bit.”

“Was it ok?”

“Yeah,” Richie said. He shuffled back on his ass, leaning up against the pillows, and drew his knees up to himself. For all he’d accepted that he wasn’t particularly small ever since his gangly limb-sprouting growth-spurt as a teenager, Richie suddenly desperately wanted to roll up into the tiniest ball he possibly could. “Why did you—” He hesitated, not sure he even wanted to ask. “Why did you want to do that?”

Eddie clambered up beside Richie so they were sat shoulder to shoulder, and leaned against him, head sitting snug in the space between Richie’s jaw and his collarbone. “I just wanted it,” he said, honest in a way that also sounded like he was frustrated. “Didn’t you want it, too?”

Richie felt a wobbly, wet feeling in his throat, and weirdly like his fingers and toes were fading out, a numb sensation stealing over him, nerves or something else. He swallowed. “I want – I like it when you’re enjoying yourself.”

“Right, but—” Eddie pursed his lips and pulled away a little. “My therapist says – _don’t_ roll your eyes – my therapist says – she says that it’s important, when it comes to – when it comes to sex, to be like, present and aware of what we need out of it, both physically _and_ emotionally. And she says that – that figuring out what that is through play and experimentation is actually a really important part of adult development.”

“Right,” Richie said, blankly. “I don’t – what does that mean?”

“It means you should ask me, if you want to do something different.”

“I don’t want to do something different,” Richie said, a hot, prickling feeling at the back of his neck. “I like what we do. What we do is fine.”

“ _Fine_ is not sexy.”

Richie made a flailing, helpless gesture. “I don’t know what to tell you, Eds. Sorry I’m not kinky enough for you. I thought you didn’t want me to bring my character-work into the bedroom.”

Eddie sighed, and Richie felt suddenly awful. He’d just had one of the best fucking orgasms of his life, pinned to the bed while Eddie Kaspbrak and his thighs of steel bucking-broncoed the shit out of his dick, and now Richie was killing the afterglow with his weird freakout. “I’m just saying,” Eddie said, kindly, with a patience Richie really didn’t feel he deserved, “I want to – I just want you to really get to enjoy something for yourself, you know?” And then, with a weird, keenly knowing look that made Richie feel all peeled-open, like a wet and wrinkled grape, he added, “If there’s anything _else_ you ever want to try, anything at all, you can just _ask_ for it, okay?”

“Okay, okay,” Richie said, putting his hands up. “When I finally develop a fetish for sticking root vegetables up my ass or whatever, I promise you’ll be the first to know.”

Eddie rolled his eyes, and Richie felt again that hollow, swooping feeling of having been a disappointment somehow. “I’m going to shower,” Eddie said, and kissed Richie on the cheek before getting up and walking away. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter warnings: Richie is dismissive of therapy. internalised self-hate on Richie's part. undernegotiated kink. Richie experiences a bit of a drop. Eddie doesn't know about proper aftercare. i promise they're just trying their best.

Despite his reliance on WebMD (and other online medical advice that he declared legitimate if it confirmed what he already suspected in the first place), Eddie did actually place a great deal of trust in doctors. He respected health professionals with medical and psych degrees, and he liked being given tangible information he could put into practice that would yield calculable results.

He also believed that if you could pay someone to deal with your shit for you, then you should. As soon as he started his divorce proceedings, Eddie had started seeing a therapist. A therapist was a qualified professional with specific skills providing a service – like a plumber, or a lawyer, or a car mechanic – that you could pay to fix your problems. (This reliance on money as a coping mechanism for covering up issues he didn’t want to deal with was actually the first thing his therapist brought up in his early sessions. Eddie was extremely annoyed by the irony and Richie very carefully tried not to laugh at him.)

Eddie had suggested it to Richie, once. While they unloaded take-out boxes from the vegan Vietnamese place that Eddie stopped by on his way back from work every Thursday night, he’d said, “You think you’d want to try it?”

Richie was peeking into the boxes to see which ones had peanuts and which didn’t. Eddie wasn’t allergic to peanuts (as it had turned out, he wasn’t actually allergic to anything, despite literally everything he’d ever been told his entire life) but he still hated how it _tastes_ _like a shoe fucking died in my mouth_. “What, therapy?”

“Yeah.”

Richie extricated the peanutless noodles from the bag and put them down on Eddie’s side of the table. “Dunno,” he said, evasively. Richie had always kind of thought therapy was only useful for people who didn’t know what their problem was and who needed help figuring it out. Richie already had an itemised list of what his problems were, and the list began and ended with himself and his personality. He didn’t need a shrink to help him think about that any more than he already thought about it every day.

“It’s been such a fucking help,” Eddie said, and he handed Richie a pair of chopsticks. “What with Myra, and the divorce, and… everything.”

Richie used the chopsticks to try to pinch Eddie’s nose. “I’m glad,” he said, and he meant it. “You deserve to be happy.”

After they’d started eating, Richie’s laptop propped up open on their dining room table, watching clips of Seth Myers on youtube because Eddie had decided a real TV wasn’t a priority in his hastily-assembled post-Myra apartment, Eddie suddenly said, “You too, you know.”

Richie, busy trying to make sure every last soybean in his noodle bowl was coated with leftover lime-chilli sauce, said, distracted, “Me too, what?”

“You deserve to be happy.”

“Uh, okay,” Richie said. “Sure.”

“In case you thought you didn’t. Deserve it.” Eddie stabbed a bit of sesame-fried tofu and ate it with a vicious kind of aggression, like he was annoyed about something, although Richie couldn’t begin to guess what it was, except that tofu was fucking gross in any and all permutations and that was enough to make anyone both angry and disappointed. “Because you do.”

“Okay,” Richie said, cautiously. It wasn’t that he actively believed he deserved to be _unhappy_. It was just that his feelings towards being told he deserved to be happy were very much like when celebrities on twitter magnanimously declared, _whoever needs to hear this, you deserve to have a nice day_. The sentiment was kind, but it was so nonspecific he never really felt like it applied to him. It was just a thing people said, out there, in the ether, and it was none of his business. “I _am_ happy, though. I’m happy with you.”

“Well, _good_. I’m fucking happy with you, too.”

“Good.”

“ _Good!_ ”

“Are we arguing?”

“No,” Eddie sighed. And then he’d pushed his socked foot against Richie’s bare ankle and rubbed him with his toes, apologetic, and Richie had sat there, mystified all the way until they cleared up dinner and went to bed.

Richie was extremely positive about Eddie’s relationship with his therapist, and all the great mental recalibration that came with it. It just wasn’t something he’d thought of doing for himself. Besides, Richie kind of felt like he’d done his own therapizing already. He’d burned that token, killed that clown, saved Eddie from a collapsing building, sat by his hospital bedside, and confessed his feelings. It was like a therapy speed-run, burning through years of closeted confusion to come crashing out the other side soaked in alien clown-gut viscera, weeping under the weight of his own emotions and gagging for cock.

If he could admit that, then he was fine. Everything was fine.

The next night, Richie had Eddie bent almost in half, on his back, ankles crossed behind Richie’s neck, and Eddie was making all the best kinds of noises, sighs and moans, meeting Richie with every thrust.

“Y-yeah, just – right there, Richie,” Eddie said, bowing and arching his back, trying to get it where he wanted it. “There, _there_.”

Richie obliged, shuffling up on his spread knees, chasing the angle to make it better. “Yeah?” he breathed, fucking up with his hips.

“Yeah, God.” And Eddie put up one arm, slow and clumsy, to touch Richie’s cheek, to thread into his hair. “So good, Richie.”

Richie made a tiny noise and closed his eyes. Then, shocked, he let out a louder noise when he felt Eddie’s hand tug his hair, hard.

“Eyes open,” Eddie said. “Look at me.”

Richie’s eyes flew open.

“What do you want, right now?”

Richie’s movement stuttered, and so did his voice when he said, “I – this is fine. Isn’t it good for you?”

“I’m not – _ahfffuck_ – asking about me, _asshole_ ,” Eddie said. “I’m asking about you.”

“Oh _yeah_ , calling me an asshole, that usually does it.”

“If that was it, we’d be glued ass to dick twenty-four seven.”

“Yeah, I don’t have that kind of stamina anymore.” There was a sudden weird, gurgling feeling in Richie’s stomach, like he hadn’t digested something right. “My dick hasn’t taken that kind of a chafing since that time I jerked off thirteen times in one day in the summer of ’94.”

“Who says it has to be your dick getting chafed?”

“Uhh, who else’s dick would it be? I don’t remember saying we were making this an open relationship.”

“No, asshole—”

“Oh yeah, baby, talk dirty to me—”

“—I mean we could _switch_.”

Richie sat back in surprise, and Eddie made a face, uncrossing his legs and dropping them down either side of Richie’s hips. “Switch?” Richie asked.

“Yeah,” Eddie said, and he was blushing. “Is that something you’d want?”

“I—” Richie wrapped his arms round himself. He was getting goosebumps like he was cold, even though the windows were all closed and the air was weighty and warm with sex-smells and sweat. “Is it something _you’d_ want?”

“Richie,” Eddie groaned, and he pushed himself up to his elbows. His face was scrunched, red-flushed and annoyed, and usually it was kind of adorable, but right now it was verging on almost upset. “If you don’t want me to fuck you, just say it.”

And Eddie was so completely not in the ballpark, so far out he was in the next field over, Richie almost laughed. “No – I mean, not _no_ , I just – this is fine, I like it when, when we do—” And God, how many more times was Eddie going to make him say it? “When we do what _you_ like. Whatever that is. I _like that_.” Richie tried to make it land with all the weight and meaning of the things he was trying to get out but couldn’t. “I like it a _lot_. Knowing it’s good for you.”

And this was why Richie didn’t go to fucking therapy. He didn’t need to dig any deeper into his embarrassingly needy people-pleasing issues, or take a long look under the magnifying glass at why getting pat on the head and being told he was doing a good job made him rock hard. He was just another in a long line of comedians who got off on praise and validation. Nothing new there. He took a deep breath. “I don’t – I don’t want you to do anything for me like, as a favor. I only want to be doing things _you want to do_.” Richie laughed, shakily. “That’s – honestly, I’m not even joking, that’s like, the only criteria for me.”

Eddie looked at Richie, sharply. Then he crawled up into Richie’s lap, running his fingers through the back of his hair, guiding Richie’s mouth down to his into a kiss. He pulled back, looking Richie in the eyes. “Yeah, okay. I get it.” And he didn’t say anything else about it.

\---

For someone who was so fucking particular about food standards and preparation to the point where only a handful of restaurants and takeout places even entered into the Venn diagram of food Eddie deemed safe to eat and the distance he was willing to drive to eat it, Eddie was a shockingly awful cook.

Myra had been the one who did all the cooking when they were together. She would shoo him good-naturedly from the kitchen when he’d try to help out, and sometimes less good-naturedly if he tried to insist. Once she’d dissolved into unstoppable hiccupping sobs when she noticed a salad Eddie had made for himself in the fridge to take to work the next day. She’d stared at it, then asked him in her gasping, broken voice if he didn’t trust her to look after him anymore. He’d felt so guilty he’d put the food in the trash there and then, just to get her to calm down.

Between his abusive childhood and controlling marriage, Eddie hadn’t been given many opportunities to learn a whole lot of skills on his own. He could boil pasta, but his aversion to anything that could be considered _al dente_ meant his attempts often turned to thick, gluey mouthfuls which Richie couldn’t have choked down even to spare Eddie’s feelings.

Richie, for his part, had subsisted for most of his life on a diet of instant ramen way beyond the college-appropriate age bracket for it. Still, even _he_ figured it couldn’t hurt to be able to scrounge up a home-cooked meal once in a while. And he was propelled, too, by a desire for things to be _nice_ for Eddie. He didn’t delude himself into thinking he was going to turn overnight into the perfect house-husband who would have a nutritional and delicious meal on the table every night when his man came home from work – and Eddie would have fucking hated that whole set-up anyway – but he could try at least to toss up a basic stir-fry for them to eat together now and then. And if Richie stuck a couple of dusty candles on the table that he’d found at the back of one of the kitchen drawers, it was because he was an absolute fucking sap for romantic gestures, whether Eddie appreciated them or not. The fact that it made Eddie stop in his tracks for a second, and then roll his eyes before pressing Richie up against the refrigerator and kissing the shit out of him was really just a bonus.

After they’d finished the meal, Eddie pushed his plate to the side and put his hands on the table in front of him. He’d been uncharacteristically quiet throughout, and Richie had loaded the silences with spiralling, pointless anecdotes to cover the nervous disappointment that was creeping up in him that maybe Eddie had hated the food, or worse, that by cooking for him Richie had reminded Eddie too much of Myra and the whole shit-show of a marriage that he never wanted to fucking bring up ever if it could be helped. But then Eddie looked at Richie with a smile, a real sincere one, not exasperated or tight at the edges, and his eyes were strangely glowy in the candlelight, like they were maybe a bit misted-up.

“Richie,” he said, and his voice was low and warm and it never failed to give Richie a thrill right to his fucking toes, that his own name got to be said out loud like that. “Thanks for all this. It was – really nice.”

“No problemo.” Richie tapped his fork on the edge of his plate and said, breezily, “That’s the miracle of the modern age, I guess. Take an idiot who couldn’t find the ass-end of a skillet on a good day, give him access to youtube and a stir-fry-for-dummies speedrun, and suddenly he’s the next Gordon Ramsey.” Richie snapped his mouth shut before he could continue with the rest of the questions coming up his throat; _but did you like it? Was it alright? Did it make you happy? Are you sure?_

Eddie just looked at him, a soft look still in his eyes.

Richie pushed his own plate aside, suddenly feeling like hot jello; wobbly-warm all over and fucking useless in the blast zone of Eddie’s piercingly tender gaze. He cleared his throat. “Well. Come on, then. If I do the cooking, you do the dishes, Eds, that’s how a partnership works. You better roll your sleeves up, because I’ve got a wok the size of Alaska in the sink that needs scrubbing out—”

“I can do the dishes later.”

“You can?” Richie asked, dubiously. “You’ll get mad when the sauce gets all crusty and sticks to the plates.”

“Fuck the sauce. Let it go crusty.”

“I think that’s the dirtiest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“I mean it.” Eddie stood up, and his chair scraped the tiled floor with a honk in the quiet of the apartment in a way that made Richie startle, feeling suddenly called to attention. “Come on.”

“I – yeah, alright.” Richie pushed his own chair back and stood up.

Eddie reached for him, pulling Richie close, hands pushing up the back of his shirt so his fingers could smooth across Richie’s bare back. He kissed the middle of his chest, then tiptoed up to kiss Richie’s neck and shoulder. Then Eddie pulled back, hands on Richie’s waist.

“Can you do something for me?”

“Mm.” Richie looped his hands behind Eddie’s neck, thumbs skimming up his jaw.

But Eddie took Richie’s wrists and pushed his hands away. “Go to the bathroom.”

“What?”

“Go to the bathroom. Brush your teeth. Clean – uh. Clean yourself up. All over. Then wait for me in the bedroom. With your clothes off.”

“Okay.” Richie swallowed. “Why?”

“Because I want to practice my nude life drawings. Why’d you fucking _think_ , Richie?”

Richie snorted. “No, I mean – why are we going separately?”

“I’ll meet you there. After you do what I asked.”

Richie’s breath caught. “I— ok, I guess.”

“Go on, then.”

Richie stumbled away to the bathroom, throwing a glance over his shoulder at Eddie who folded his arms and watched him go, a dark, anticipatory look on his face.

In the bathroom, Richie pulled his shirt off and hopped out of his jeans, turning them inside out with the speed he yanked them off, socks lost and bundled inside the legs.

He wondered what Eddie was doing, and his brain stuttered on an image of Eddie in the bedroom already, touching himself, naked – no, not naked, still dressed, hand inside the open zip of his pants, rubbing his stiff cock over his underwear, waiting for Richie to come in.

 _Shit_. Richie grabbed his toothbrush and worked up a quick lather to get the garlicky dinner-taste out of his mouth, scrubbing clumsily and so hard he made his gums bleed a little. He rinsed out, then looked up at himself in the mirror, baring his teeth, checking for rogue pieces of broccoli. He gave his underarms a cursory sniff. He smelt alright, but Eddie had specifically asked him to clean up _all over_ , which meant – maybe Eddie had something specific in mind, and Richie would hate to ruin the mood by being unprepared.

He hopped and hovered on the bathroom mat for a second before jumping into the shower to douse himself in hot water, scrubbing expeditiously at his dick and balls, trying not to get distracted by closing a slippery hand around his cock to touch himself where he’d started to stiffen in anticipation. And then, without letting himself think too hard about it, Richie grabbed the showerhead and, spreading his ass with one hand, let the water rush in and down his crack. Just in case.

Scrubbed pink and dried off with a towel, Richie went into the bedroom, stomach squirming. He opened the door, but the room was empty.

Richie sat himself down on the bed. His fingers twitched against his thighs. He’d left his phone on the kitchen table, and he wasn’t sure if it would ruin whatever _thing_ Eddie was planning if he went down to get it. He didn’t really want it, anyway. He felt all twitchy and turned-on, focused on waiting, the breath of anticipation shallowly expanding his chest making him anxious, electric. The last thing he needed to do right now was scroll through angry political twitter discourse.

His hand drifted to his cock for a distraction, hard there between his legs, but then he stopped. Eddie hadn’t said anything about starting without him. He put his hand down on the mattress. _Shit_. Why was he so fucking turned on? Nothing was even happening yet, but he could already feel a hot prickle of sweat behind his knees and under his arms, and a pulse of blood that started in his chest and thumped all the way into his fingers, filling his cock.

Eddie’s watch on the bedside table ticked away over the next five minutes, as Richie sat there, the shift of the sheets against his bare, scrubbed-clean ass driving him crazy.

And then the door creaked open. Richie straightened up, making an effort to stop his leg bouncing up and down. “Eddie?”

“Yeah.” Eddie slipped into the room. He was dressed, polo shirt unbuttoned at the top, but he was barefooted on the carpet. He also looked like he’d neatened up his hair, and when he approached Richie, there was a whiff of mint on him, too.

“Wait, did you brush your teeth?” Richie asked, sniffing Eddie as he came to stand in front of him. “I was in the bathroom the whole time, dude, did you do it in the kitchen?”

Eddie flushed a little red. “Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Because – I – look, shut up a sec.” Eddie put his hand on the side of Richie’s face, and Richie felt himself melt, instantly, like a lovelorn idiot, into the touch. “I don’t know if this is weird, I just—” Eddie took a breath in. Then he reached in his pocket and brought out one of his work ties, silk, dark blue, uncoiling in a soft whisper as it zipped through his fingers. He held it out to Richie, an offering.

Richie felt his whole stomach drop. He swallowed.

“You wanna?” Eddie asked, nervously. 

And Richie wanted. Whatever Eddie was planning to do with it, Richie fucking wanted so much it was embarrassing. But what he said was, “Sure, whatever you want.”

Eddie gave him a look, calculating, eyes skimming over Richie head to toe. Richie tried not to to fidget under the scrutiny, but his cock had no such sense of control, flushed and hard, and he knew how fucking obvious it looked. And maybe Eddie took pity on him, then, because he didn't ask any more questions, he just came around to kneel behind Richie on the bed. His hands – soft, clean, lotioned – moved over Richie’s to gather them behind his back. In the silence of the room, the silk shifted noisily, looping over his wrists, pulling taut, and Richie could hear his own breath loud in his ears. And then Eddie was standing in front of him again.

“Okay.” Eddie’s own hands flexed against the front of his jeans. Richie could see his cock, trapped behind denim, in a thick line beneath the zipper. It made Richie’s mouth water, what the _fuck_ , just looking at him. He shifted, and felt the pull of resistance around his wrists. “Now, don’t say anything, alright?” Eddie said. “Unless you want me to stop. Otherwise, let me talk.”

Richie bit back the _fuck yeah_ on his tongue, and exhaled noisily through his nose instead.

Eddie nodded curtly, steeling himself, and then he pushed his jeans down his thighs and pulled his cock out. His hands, Richie thought - his hands were fucking _perfect_ , wrapping around his dick, the sharp valleys of his knuckles shadowed in the low light, flexing with his movements. Richie watched as Eddie stroked himself, thumb rubbing at the head to spread the slick around, making wet noises in the silence. Eddie’s eyes were fluttering closed, and he sighed, head tilting back, and Richie could see the tendons in his neck, the thick vein that went to his pulse point just in the fingerprint shadow under his ear, the dip of his collarbone showing where his polo shirt was undone by two slutty little buttons. Richie wanted – he _wanted_ – to put his mouth there, everywhere, to get to his knees and take Eddie’s cock in his mouth, all of it, all the way. He made a noise, involuntary, a pathetic-sounding whine, and he flushed all the way up to his scalp.

Eddie’s eyes blinked open, wide and keen, dark, almost all pupil. His hand stilled, tight around the root of his cock. “I want your mouth,” he said, and Richie felt a thrill of heat go all the way down his spine and into his ass. “Come here.”

With a lack of grace that he really couldn’t give a flying fuck about, Richie slid off the bed and to his knees, hitting the carpeted floor clumsily, practically panting as he leaned forward. Eddie’s hand cupped his cheek, holding for a moment. Then, gently, he pushed his cock into Richie’s mouth.

Richie hollowed his cheeks and sucked, hard, trying all the tricks he could manage to make it as good as he could. He bobbed his head, going as far down as he could, then pulled back up, licking and swirling his tongue and swallowing the taste of it. His whole body felt warm, expansive, pinched taut between two tightrope points – Eddie’s heat, in his mouth, and the tugging, chafing ache of his wrists bound behind his back.

“Fuck, _fuck_ , so good, Richie, I’m—” Eddie’s hands were in Richie’s hair, gripping, nails scratching lightly over his scalp, holding Richie there as he thrust, arrhythmic and uncoordinated, making soft, overwhelmed noises that washed over Richie’s skin like a hot fucking shower. And then Eddie’s hands tightened, and he grabbed a hard handful of Richie’s hair, and he pulled him back.

Richie looked up blurrily. His lips felt raw, tender. Eddie looked down at him, mouth parted, breathing hard.

“Can I—” Eddie started, and then he said, instead, “I want to come on your face,” breathless and taut, and it should have been hilarious and awful, but instead Richie nearly swallowed his tongue and had to put his forehead against Eddie’s thigh to stop himself from fainting like he was a fictional Victorian woman having a fit of the vapors. “Richie.” Eddie’s thumb stroked across his cheekbone, pushing his face back to tilt up at him. “Is that okay?”

Eyes screwed shut, his dick hard enough to drill through steel, Richie nodded. He heard Eddie sigh, then he heard the sound of his hand on his cock, the fast, wet, desperation of it, the moans as Eddie wound himself up closer to the edge, and then his voice, tense and low, “So good, fuck, Richie, you’re so fucking hot, _jesus_ , look at you, so good for me, so good, you’re gonna make me come, Richie, _fuck_ —”

And then Richie felt it on his face, hot and wet and sticky as he might have expected, but also somehow nothing like what he’d imagined either – probably because he’d never actually stopped to think, _wonder what Eddie’s jizz would feel like dripping off my nose_ – and mostly he felt the flaming heat of his own cheeks underneath it, the way his mouth opened without meaning to, bringing the taste of it onto his tongue.

“Christ.” Eddie looked down at Richie, flushed to his chest, cock still wet in his fist from Richie’s mouth, stunned-looking. He cleared his throat. “Stay there.” And he walked out.

Richie shifted. His toes were cramping up, and his knees were starting to twinge unpleasantly. There was a tight, pinched feeling in his back from where his shoulders were pushed together, and his skin itched from his forehead to his chest, prickly with cooling sweat and drying come. His cock was heavy between his legs.

Eddie walked back in, jeans zipped up, holding a washcloth. “Here,” he said, quietly, and then passed the cloth, lukewarm and damp, over Richie’s face, cleaning him up. Then he stepped back, and Richie swayed forward without meaning to. He felt dazed, needy, but kind of blank, too, like the useless, spongy matter of his brain had dumped its usual prickly cascade of thoughts, and left only thick, cottony nothing in its wake. “Hey,” Eddie said, and Richie glanced up. “You ok?”

Richie tried to say _yeah_ , but his mouth felt gummy, and something had sent all his words swirling down his sieve of a brain, so he just nodded.

“Okay. Get on the bed?” There was an inflection there like it was a question, but Richie knew Eddie wasn’t expecting an answer. Still, Richie wasn’t the one who went to the gym three times a week to do hamstring curls and glute-busting exercises that made the muscles in his legs pop and flex with coiled, athletic power. Richie’s legs were tree trunks, with the same level of brittle inflexibility, and there was no way he was going to be able to get up with his hands tied behind his back without faceplanting directly into the carpet and killing every single sexy vibe Eddie had worked so hard to create.

He wanted to say it, but couldn’t. He hung his head, and a noise came halfway up his throat, a little embarrassed and a shade hysterical. Unless Eddie told him what to do, or physically put him where he wanted him, Richie was stuck.

But Eddie seemed to get it. “Shit, hang on,” he said. He reached onto the bed for a pillow, then seemed to have another thought, and grabbed a second one. He squatted down to Richie’s level, and tucked a pillow up in front of him. “Here, kneel on that.” And then the second pillow, a little further in front of the first one, and Eddie’s face went red, saying, “Put your head down on that one. Like this.” And he pushed, gentle, easing Richie down, bending him at the waist so that his head lay sideways on the pillow, the rest of his back travelling in a straight line up that ended with his ass in the air.

Richie let out a shocked sound, and caught himself, pushing his face into the pillow to muffle the noise. He felt exposed, trussed up like a goddamn turkey, with his hands still tied behind his back and his knees slipping outwards, back bowed and legs spread. _What the fuck_ , he thought. _What the fuck, what the fuck_. He was so hard he was dizzy with it. He’d never felt this turned on, with such sharpness, in a way that was all-consuming like this. It was painful, almost, the sensation not just in his cock and balls but pulling back all the way into his guts, to the base of his spine, down his neural fucking pathways all the way into his head. He wanted – he didn’t know what he wanted. He was just fucking desperate for it.

“Fuck, Richie,” Eddie said, voice cutting into the needful mess of static in Richie’s brain, staring down at Richie. “You look – so fucking hot like this, you don’t even know.”

Richie squeezed his eyes shut. He didn’t – he couldn’t imagine. He must have looked gormless and graceless, all twisted and bent up like this, but Eddie had looked at him so keenly, wanting, like he was pleased by what he saw, and that made Richie feel hot all the way through.

Richie heard the sound of shuffling, and felt Eddie’s hands trail over his back, rounding up and around his ass, touching him softly. And then, the clicking noise of something being uncapped, a wet noise. Richie held his breath, blood rushing to his head, and then let it out in one shocked exhale when Eddie’s fingers rubbed, cool and slippery, between his cheeks.

“ _Ahhhh_!” Richie said, an explosive sound in the quiet around them, and his knees slipped wider apart. Eddie’s fingers were circling the area around his asshole, going round in a spiral, closer and closer, then pressing down and in, gently, and Richie cried out again, swearing mindlessly into the pillow.

“Good?” Eddie said, and he was close by, speaking softly somewhere near Richie’s head, one arm stroking up and down his spine while the other pushed his finger into Richie’s ass.

“Hhh-yeah,” Richie said, clenching, twisting, trying to push back, to get more. Jesus _christ_ it felt good, Eddie’s finger, pushing inside him, all the way to the knuckle, those sharp knuckles that he cracked all the time without realising he did it, even though he made Richie stop when _he_ did it in case he got early-onset arthritis. And then Eddie rotated his hand, crooking up to press in, and Richie shouted out as he felt a hot, sharp twist deep in his center, as if he’d been kicked straight in the gut by sharp-toed boots, but way better, a million times better.

“Fuck, yes,” Eddie said, and he pulled his finger out, only to come back nudging in with a second, sliding and twisting in like a screwdriver, hard and ungiving, and Richie could only try to relax, try to take it, rutting back and forth against the air, unable to touch, to get relief for his cock that twitched and spurted with every stroke of Eddie’s fingers. “God,” Eddie whispered. “You look so good, Rich, you’re taking it so well, doing so good.”

Richie felt a delirious spiral of heat wrap all around him, tightening with each word Eddie spilled into his ear, with each thrust of Eddie’s fingers driving into his ass, twisting and seeking, nudging up against his prostate, making him see fucking stars, making his cock leak a wetness that dripped from the tip, making a mess of the pillow underneath him. “Eddie,” he gritted out. He was so fucking close, hovering on the brink of it, but he was sky high and it looked like a long way down, and his heart was beating so hard he could feel it in his ass.

“Yeah,” Eddie said, and his other hand came up to cup Richie’s cock, hot in his palm, and Richie almost cried with the feel of it, with how tender it was, this part of him that Eddie was holding so gently for him, caring for him. “Do you wanna come, Richie?”

“I – I want—” Richie sobbed. The tension in his legs was almost unbearable with the way he was holding himself, trying to fuck back onto Eddie’s fingers, to thrust his cock forward into his hand, and his balls were heavy and drawn up tight with want.

“Do it,” Eddie said. “I want to see.”

And Richie came so hard he felt like his entire body had been shred in half from ass to head, disintegrating into pieces around his bones, like his whole weight and mass had been sloughed off in one swift, killer blow, leaving him nothing but a floating expanse of nerves and stardust.

He came around a moment later to the feeling of Eddie fiddling with the tie around his wrists, loosening it until his hands came free, and his arms dropped down to his sides, a dead weight tingling with numbness. He was breathing hard, his skin alight with tiny aftershocks that felt like they were zipping up each individual hair on his arms, legs, chest, ass. But there was a tight feeling in his throat, too, hovering there, like a smooth, glass ball lodged in his oesophagus, and he swallowed hard around it.

Eddie helped him up onto the bed, joints cracking, a big, strung-together gangle of aches and pains, and Richie went, quietly.

Then Eddie left the room, and there was a curious void in his wake. There was the sound of water running in the bathroom next door, and then he came back in and sat on the end of the bed, near enough, but not quite touching. “So,” he said.

Richie wrapped his arms around his chest. He kind of wanted his pants back. “So,” he repeated.

“Are – you good?”

Richie blinked. The outside edges of his vision were blurry. More blurry than usual, even with his glasses off. “Yeah, dude,” he said. His voice sounded creaky and raw, like he’d been shouting.

“Right.” Eddie shot Richie a look. “It’s just, no offense, but you look kind of – checked out.” He inched forward on the bedspread. “Was that not okay for you? Did I do something wrong?”

Richie opened his mouth, licked his lips, and tried to speak, but something had interrupted the connection from his brain to the place where he normally formulated and stored up the words he wanted to use. It was usually so loud in there, a clusterfuck of jostling phrases colliding and splintering into half-finished sentences, and he had to run double-time to keep up with the mess of them, trying to keep one step ahead and corral the tantrumic noise into something recognisable. Right now, though, it was scattered and empty in there, like a leaf-blower had come in and swept it all away leaving a weird, bare slab of blasted concrete. But Eddie was narrowing his eyes and creasing his eyebrows in a way that was halfway between worried and fully freaked out, so Richie shook his head _no_.

“Right.” Eddie dragged a hand through his hair. “Are you _sure_?”

Richie’s skin felt clammy. He could only shrug.

“Okay, now I’m really kinda worried,” Eddie said, and there was a sharp, high edge to his voice, the way it got when he was starting to panic. “You’re freaking me out. Have I broken you?”

Richie drew his knees up to his chest. “You haven’t broken me,” he said slowly, voice a bit pasty in his mouth. “I’m just – processing.”

“Oh, okay,” Eddie said, and he was definitely starting to sound hysterical now. “That’s fine. You can process. That’s totally fine.” His eyes were wide-stretched and the anxious slant of his eyebrows was knitted into one dark and nervous line. “Maybe while you process you can you come over here before I have a fucking panic attack?” He opened his arms, entreating.

“Uh.” Richie stared a moment, trying to remember what he had to do to make the right muscles move to unfurl all the achey, fleshy, vulnerable parts of himself and give them up into Eddie’s arms. But when Richie didn’t move, Eddie pulled himself over to Richie instead, gathering him up and hoisting him to his chest like a lumpy old sweater that had unravelled into a tangled ream of pilled yarn, useless and floppy. 

Eddie grabbed Richie’s hand and brought it to his lips. He kissed it, over and over, desperately, just there above the wristbone, and something warm and good flooded into Richie up through that tender point into the rest of his body, like a magic glow was coursing through him, like he was Pinocchio turning back into a real boy. Richie sighed out a breath, rubbing his face on Eddie’s chest.

There was a moment of quiet. And then, “I kind of fucked that, didn’t I?” Eddie said, low and calm, though Richie could hear the labour of breath in his chest as if he was consciously trying to clamp down on the shrillness of his tone. “The website I read said something about aftercare but I wasn’t exactly planning on – I didn’t think it would apply this time, necessarily. I didn’t know that’s what we were doing. I thought – some other time, maybe.”

Something slotted into Richie’s brain, like a quarter dropping into an arcade machine. “You did research for this?”

“Uh. Sort of. Apparently not enough. I just googled some stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“Just – stuff.” Eddie’s neck was red, going up to his ears. “Like. _This_ kind of stuff. It was what you said the other day. How the only criteria for you was doing what _I_ wanted to do. So I read up on it and there were all these websites about like, submission and whatever, and it seemed to track, but I wasn’t planning on going all fifty shades of fucking grey on you. I thought this was just like, making things a bit spicy, not turning them into a psychological fucking minefield.” He sighed. “I should’ve read more articles.”

“Oh.” Richie’s brain was slowly futzing back into focus, static lines tuning-up into colour again. He looked at Eddie. “You’re a nerd.”

“Not nerdy enough,” Eddie said, and then he tapped a finger at the centre of Richie’s chest when Richie let out a small, croaky chuckle. “I’m serious, Richie. I really enjoyed what we did tonight, and I don’t have any regrets about the sex part of it—” _The sex part_ , he said, all enunciated and emphatic the way he did nowadays, like he was stripping away the secret, shadowy power of these concepts that he’d spent too long mumbling shamefully. “But I’ll do the rest of it right, too, next time.”

Richie blinked and breathed in. “Next time?”

“Yeah.” Eddie tilted Richie by the chin to bring their lips together. “Next time.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> note: this chapter focuses on richie's probable adhd and his own resulting issues/guilt around those aspects of his behaviour.

\---

When Richie was nineteen, he had a crush on a guy in one of his college classes. With hindsight and the full 20/20 clarity of his returning memory, he knew exactly what it was about the guy, Johnny, that had attracted Richie’s gaze – he was compact in size, a bit mean, and had perpetually furious eyebrows, even when laughing, which was something he made a point of resisting around Richie who, in Johnny’s own words, didn’t need his dick sucked any more than Richie already did it himself.

Richie’s lisping, “offer’s on the table, darling,” was always a joke, until the night he and Johnny got just drunk enough a month before Richie dropped out of college for good and he said it again in the dark of Johnny’s dorm-room, with no build, no set-up, and no punchline at all. Richie couldn’t even muster up the campy impression complete with limp wrist and simpering voice that would later get him big laughs in the working men’s club gigs in the early 00s – instead, his voice was hoarse, low, and it landed there, bare and fucking needy between them on Johnny’s unmade bed, littered with empty beer cans.

There’d been a frozen moment in which Richie had thought about maybe jumping out the window, but then Johnny had cleared his throat, and, not looking at Richie, had unbuckled his stupid, garish, eagle-engraved Kid Rock monstrosity of a belt, unzipping his fly. Richie stared, counting his breaths in the soggy, fog-doused wetness of his brain. He looked up at Johnny whose face was red-flushed, and he gestured at Richie, as if to say, _now you_.

“Dude,” Richie had said, too-loud, hands shaking too hard to even get at the fucking button on his jeans, “is this, like, a balls-out version of gay chicken that ends with me getting my whole dick out and then someone fucking geronimoes out of the air-vent with a camera and takes a picture of it and puts photos up all over campus? ‘Cos I dunno if blackmail over dick pics has the same traction when the dude is still playing the student bar, y’know? Like, maybe wait until I’m up to midweek slots at bigger venues before you play that card.”

“God, shut up,” Johnny had said. “Don’t you ever _shut up_?”

“Can’t. Genetically incapable.”

“Look—” Johnny put a hand down his boxers, and let out a small _uh_ breath as he adjusted his dick in the confines of his jeans. “Do you wanna suck me off or not?”

Contradicting his own claims, Richie said nothing. He was practically vibrating with anxiety and a treacherous feeling of desire. Adrenaline spiked cold and clammy in nervous pathways down his arms, leaving the tips of his fingers numb. His stomach was flip-flopping foolishly and his head was a thrumming drunk-hot mess. Yeah, he wanted. Of course he wanted.

“So it _does_ shut up,” Johnny said. “If I’d known that’s all it took—”

It ended with Richie crouched by the end of the bed, the skin on the back of his knuckles pinched by the dumb belt buckle as he closed a shaking hand around the root of Johnny’s cock. Richie sucked him, sloppy and hungry for it, but unable to push away the embarrassment that he could feel threatening to emerge, later, along with the mother of all hangovers, from under the muddling blanket of alcohol.

“Yeah,” Johnny grunted. He was quiet, talking under his breath, but Richie caught all his words anyway, amplified in the terror-silence of the furtive, clandestine suddenness of the act. “ _Fuck_ yeah – guess that mouth is good for something, huh, Tozier? _Fuck_ , I should tell everyone, if you wanna – _ah –_ if you wanna shut him up—”

Johnny came without warning, filling Richie’s mouth with shocking heat. Richie drew back, panicked, disgusted, and grabbed a half-empty can from the floor to spit in. Then he’d crouched there, shoulders hunched, embarrassed to death and more turned on than he could ever remember being in his life, a twisting kind of ugly thing writhing about in his chest that felt a bit like resentment, like wounded pride. But there was also a weakening in his knees, in his spine, that made him want to do it again and do it _more,_ to get Johnny’s fingers in his mouth, his knuckles, his whole freaking fist in there, _why not_ , while Richie stripped his dick raw.

His chest heaving, Richie barely got a hand on himself before he was coming in his pants.

“Jesus,” Johnny had said, and then did his belt back up without another word.

\---

“So, this is the thing,” Richie was saying loudly, twenty years later, bursting in on a startled Eddie who shouted _fuck_ as his hand jerked and spilled muesli all over the kitchen countertop.

“ _Richie_ ,” Eddie said plaintively, the way he used to do when they were kids, stretching Richie’s name out to a whole four syllables, high-pitched and outraged. And Richie, like the scabby little turd he was, had always done something ten times more annoying right away to get Eddie to do it again.

“Sorry,” Richie said, because he was not that turd anymore, picking up a dishcloth and pitching it over to Eddie.

Eddie caught it, and started mopping up the spilt milk. “What's going on? Must be important for you to be up at—” He checked his watch – unnecessarily, since Eddie had an unfailingly regular circadian rhythm and set alarms on his phone to time each precise fifteen-minute interval of his morning ablutions. “—7.30 in the morning.” His smirk was teasing, but it was soft and fond, too, and Richie was suddenly struck with one of those heady, smack-in-the-face reminders of how stupidly much he loved this man.

“It’s – kind of a big conversation,” Richie said.

“Okay.” Eddie crossed his arms and leaned back against the counter. “I’m listening.” His phone beeped, the start of his next 15-minute slot, but Eddie swiped to ignore the reminder, and then put it down.

Breathing deep, Richie said, “Okay, this might be easier if I just start talking and try to make my way through the whole thing so maybe don’t interrupt me yet. I’ll take questions at the end - we can have a Q&A sesh about my sex life - but I just need to say this bit first.” Richie drummed his hands on his thighs, less of a _drumroll please_ and more to shake off the incoming embarrassment. “So, what we did yesterday. The sex. That was good. And obviously you - noticed something about me, otherwise you wouldn’t have been doing _research_ about it. And I know I kind of flipped out for a sec, but I really liked it. Maybe I flipped out _because_ I liked it, a lot – like, embarrassingly a lot, like I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.”

Here, Eddie took a breath in like he was about to speak, but Richie flapped a hand to shush him and barrelled on, “No, but the point is, the point _is_ that I feel kind of fucked up about it, because I really like it when you tell me what to do. When you’re all like, shut up and suck my dick, Richie! That really - I’ll do it whenever you tell me to. _Because_ you tell me to. But—” Richie wrapped his arms around himself and barked a laugh. “Hoo, boy. Okay, but the _thing is_ , I dunno if liking that makes me weird, and if it’s bad somehow, you know? Because everyone’s always telling me to shut up, and sit still, and calm down, and behave. Like, this is the kind of shit teachers and my _mom_ used to say to me growing up. And contrary to popular belief I do not have a weird mom-sex Oedipus thing. Usually when people tell me what to do it's because they're tired of me. But when _you_ say it – I like it. A lot. So, I dunno if it’s – like, _cool, you have a kink, live your truth, my dude!_ Or if it’s like, _no, you’re turning your mental issues into a sex-thing and it’s creepy and weird!_ You know? _”_ Richie flopped his arms down to his sides, like a defeated albatross.

Eddie’s mouth was a little open. He closed it, then opened it again to say, “Okay. Uh.”

“I just—” Richie realised he’d been kind of shouting and dropped his voice, suddenly. “Didn’t your therapist fix all your sex problems?”

“Oh my God.” Eddie rubbed a hand over his furrowed brow. “ _Fixed_ is a stretch but it’s super nice of you to assume I’m the stable one in this relationship.” He looked up at Richie from between the pinch of his fingers on the bridge of his nose. “If you’re asking if I can therapize your issues away _for_ you then, like... no? That’s literally what a therapist is for, Rich, so you can get a licensed professional helping you deal with your brain in an objective, uninvolved, non-judgemental environment.”

“So you’re saying you _can’t_ fix my sex problems for me,” Richie said, a little sulkily.

“I’m saying the very last thing I can be is objective and uninvolved.” Eddie opened his arms, palms up and made a little gesture for Richie to come to him. Richie went awkwardly over, sliding their hands together. “Though I _can_ offer a non-judgmental environment.”

“See, that’s why I need you, to counteract the constant disapproval from my sixty thousand twitter followers.”

“I told you validation doesn’t come from social media _.”_

“It comes from you not thinking I’m a big fucking freak?”

“No,” Eddie said, “it comes from _you_ not telling _yourself_ you’re a big fucking freak.”

“Am I not a _little_ freaky?”

“I mean, maybe in the Rick James way – _don't_ start singing it – but like. Whatever you want, honestly, it’s fine. It’s hot.”

Richie made a face. “Really.”

“Yeah. I mean, you wanting something, and wanting me to give it to you. That’s pretty much number one on my list of requirements for successful sexual congress.”

“Eh, gross.”

Eddie eyebrowed at him. “Look. My therapist says - you're allowed to just like whatever you like. You accept where you are, no matter how you got there. As long as you’re not hurting anyone. Or yourself. And it's not like I'm trying to - to change you, or oppress you, like your schoolteachers or whatever. You're not gonna turn permanently into a timid fucking church mouse if I tell you to bend over and be good for me once in a while, are you?”

Richie closed his eyes, pained. “Jeez fuckin’ Louise, Eds, you can’t _say_ shit like that, I’m about three seconds away from jumping ass-first onto your dick in front of the muesli.”

“See? No long-term damaging effects. That Richie Tozier brand of obnoxious charm is fucking fireproof.”

“Okay, but—” Richie gestured helplessly. “But that's the point, right? Don't you _want_ me to be less obnoxious? More manageable? Wouldn’t that be better? For you? For - everybody?”

“I—” Eddie looked lost, and Richie felt a tiny gut-crawl of guilt sneak its way in. It was one thing being insufferable, that was the standard Richie Tozier package deal, and only a handful of people were primed to handle it, but it was another to make Eddie do all the emotional heavy-lifting to soothe his ego and fix his mental bullshit on top of all that. But then Eddie said, “Rich, you can’t have this narrative in your head that you’re like, insufferable—” _Busted,_ Richie thought. “Or that liking you is this huge effort on my part. That’s just – that _sucks_. Because, like. I love you. _You_ , exactly as you are. And if you think you’re a shitty person, what does that say about me?”

Richie stared. “I don’t —”

“Yeah, exactly,” Eddie said. “That’s therapy 101 on self-love, asshole. You have to see yourself the way others see you.”

“You’re so fucking smart,” Richie said, admiringly. “My smart, kind, well-adjusted man.”

“Yeah, well, let’s not get carried away. You watched me yell at a self-service machine at Wholefoods yesterday.”

“And I genuinely love you anyway.”

“Snap.” Eddie went up on his toes to kiss Richie, something Richie found charming and adorable but didn’t mention right then because he didn’t want to interrupt any of the kisses Eddie was placing gently onto his lips. Then Eddie pulled back with a wry smile. “And if you want me to go all dominatrix on you sometimes then fucking _ask_ and we can figure it out.”

“Yes sir,” Richie quipped, and then he swooped down and gnawed on Eddie’s shoulder instead of letting himself feel embarrassed and overwhelmed. 

\---

Two weeks passed without much of an incident, until one Saturday afternoon when truly biblical levels of rain came torrenting down in grey sleet onto New York city. It was the kind of day that seemed ominous and fateful, somehow, the drama of the downpour and shadowy cloud-cover an appropriate backdrop to the announcement Richie was about to make, but had until that point avoided, because it seemed too weird and sordid to do it while the sun was shining.

Eddie was sitting on one of the bar-style, polished chrome stools at the marble kitchen island reading some eye-gougingly boring news about stock markets on his phone when Richie came storming in. He had his laptop in his arms, and marched all the way to stand directly in front of Eddie, then put the laptop on the worktop, open and tilted back on its axis to give Eddie a full and unobscured view of the content displayed onscreen.

“There,” Richie said, brusquely, pushing it forward.

“Padded leather locking posture collar,” Eddie read out loud. He blinked, then put down his phone. “Yeah, I mean, I’ve been telling you about your posture for months, dude, you’re going to get lumbago the way you fucking slouch at that table. I’m glad you’re doing something about it, finally.”

“Cool, cool, being deliberately obtuse for comedic effect, that’s fine, that’s okay, that’s a reaction I understand,” Richie said, throwing himself into one of the stools opposite Eddie and almost toppling right off because they were the most uselessly uncomfortable chairs it was possible to own. “But since you’re the one who’s got all the healthy coping mechanisms nowadays could you throw me a bone and be cool about this and leave the jokes to me, a professional deflector?”

“Sorry.” Eddie glanced at the screen again, then blushed and looked away. “You – is this something you want?”

“After much soul-searching, yeah, _apparently_ ,” Richie said. Then he winced, turning the screen back round to himself. “I know it’s a bit much – is it a bit much? There was like, this other one covered in spikes and studs that looked like it belonged to a rottweiler named Brutus but like, I want you to be able to fuck me without fear of impalement, so I thought this was better. There were smaller ones too, like, barely-there little choker things, but you gotta commit to the bit sometimes, you know?”

“Hang on, hang on,” Eddie made a zippy rewind gesture in the air. “You want me to fuck you in a collar?”

“Yes, Eddie, I want you to fuck me in a collar,” Richie said, and his voice was flat and nasally and sardonic, which meant he was palms-sweaty, mom’s-spaghetti, stage-fright-before-a-big-show levels of nervous, and Eddie knew it. “I want you to fuck me in a collar and – yes, I’ll say it here before God and all the clergy – I want a leash to go with it so that you can hold onto it while you rail me from behind.”

“Jesus—”

“Was that therapy? Did I do it right? Being honest about what you want? Because I dunno why you’re paying all that money, Eds, it’s easy as fuck—”

“ _Jesus_ ,” Eddie said again, snippily. “Can you give me _one_ fucking minute with that mental image?”

“Sure. You want any more details? I could be wearing a sexy little outfit, too. I dunno if the French maid thing is, like, disrespectful to the service industry nowadays, and maybe the French, too? And maybe womankind as a whole—”

“Well, what you don’t know about womankind has been the foundation of your entire career, so—”

“Eddie, _be kind_ , please, I am baring my soul – and my ass – to you here. You have to be nice to me.”

“I know. Sorry.” Eddie pressed his toe up against Richie’s shin. He rubbed for a second, contemplative. “You really want it, huh?”

Richie felt a little swoop in his stomach that was half excitement, half paranoia, a clash that balked at _you really want it, it’s so obvious, so embarrassing,_ and thrilled at _you really want it, let me be the one to give it to you_. “Yeah,” he said, eventually.

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay.” Eddie tugged the laptop back towards himself. “So, do they do express delivery, or…?”

Richie let out his breath, quiet and slow through the corner of his pursed lips, the same way he used to try to direct cigarette smoke out of his bedroom window as a teenager, out of the immediate vicinity of whoever might notice, might get angry, though he never got away with it even once. He laughed, then, letting out the rest of his breath in one, open expulsion, loosening his lungs. “Dunno – check if they got any discounts for bulk orders – there’s a massive vibrating dildo _and_ an electric cock ring that I’d like to try, for science.”

Eddie gave Richie a wry look, since Richie had a habit of couching exactly what he wanted right in the middle of pretending he didn’t want it at all. “Don’t you think we ought to take it easy? One thing at a time?”

Richie shrugged. “Suit yourself. Reckon the leather jockstrap with _master_ printed across the ass would have looked real good on you, but we can take it slow if that’s what you want.”

Eddie rolled his eyes, but he smiled as he took his credit card out of his wallet. “That’s what I want.”

\---

When the package arrived a week later (there was a cheery card inside with a bright message encouraging him to enjoy himself and to ‘come’ again soon) Richie took it to the bedroom and left it there until Eddie came back from work. He didn’t trust himself to look at it alone, didn’t want to confront the mortifying ordeal of his own sordid fantasies without Eddie there to properly contextualise it as a normal thing they were going to do as a loving couple with a perfectly healthy sex-life.

“Okay,” Eddie said, staring at the contents of the package after he’d unwrapped it that evening. The collar lay there – a less intimidating one than Richie’s original choice because of Eddie’s insistence on taking things slow, but still big enough to look shockingly real, there on their bedspread, alongside a long, leather leash. “Okay,” he said again, and then he turned around and walked out of the room.

“For the record,” Eddie said, later, once he’d calmed down and put his inhaler back in his bedside drawer, “I wasn’t freaking out.”

“Uh-huh,” Richie said, already thinking about how he could go about disposing of the package discreetly without the downstairs neighbours or TMZ finding out about it. He’d have to drive out of state, in disguise, find a place to bury it, or maybe set it on fire.

“I mean, I _was_ , but not because I don’t want to do it. I _do_. Want to do it. I just want to make sure we do it right. So, uh. In the spirit of proper preparation and full disclosure—” Eddie opened his laptop on the bed where he was sat cross-legged, typing away for a moment to bring up a document. “There’s some things we need to get sorted first.”

Richie side-eyed the laptop. “Did you put our planned sexual encounter into a _spreadsheet_?”

“No,” Eddie said. “Just a googledoc.” He cleared his throat. “First of all, we have to pick a safeword.”

“A safeword.”

“It’s meant to be something completely random but memorable, and something that you’d never usually say out of context so I know in the middle of the – of the roleplay if it’s getting too much for you and you want to stop.”

Richie snorted. “Well that’s not gonna work with me, is it? You know what I’m like. It’ll be like being told to empty your mind but accidentally manifesting the Stay Puft guy. If we pick a stupid word I’m gonna fixate on it and yell out _marshmallow man_ every five minutes even if I don’t want to.”

“It’s non-fucking-negotiable. And the plan is to get you feeling so good that you’re not _going_ to be worrying about the fucking Marshmallow Man or anything else except my dick in your ass.”

“Ugh,” Richie said, covering his face. He was already starting to feel embarrassingly turned on and they hadn’t even got to the main event yet. “I can’t believe we have to do so much talking about it before we get to do it.”

“It’s non-negotiable,” Eddie said again. “We won’t do it until you have a safeword.”

“Okay, okay, I’ll think of something.”

“Secondly,” Eddie continued, “I’ll need to make a list of things to get at CVS, like arnica cream and moisturiser for your neck in case – in case you’re bruised, or sore, after, or—”

“I barely remember to moisturise my own fucking face in the morning, I don’t need—”

“Riche!” Eddie interrupted. “Imagine it says NON-NEGOTIABLE in all-caps at the top of this document! Everything I’m saying is non-fucking-negotiable and for your own good I need you to go with me on this.”

“Okay.” Richie blinked. Eddie was staring at him, wide-eyed, a little stricken. Richie shuffled up to sit next to him, chided and weirdly touched by the outburst. No one had ever put this much fucking effort into doing something like this for him. No one else had ever created a bullet-point list of items with the specific intention of making him feel good. And was he giving back even half the care and attention that Eddie was giving him? He pressed his nose into Eddie’s neck and mumbled, “What about you? What do we need to do for you?”

“I just need you to take this seriously and promise you’ll let me do everything to take care of you while we do this really fucking hot but kind of scary thing you want to do. That’s all.”

“Okay.” Richie felt his chest clench up. “Love you.”

“Love you too,” Eddie said. “Now, thirdly, we both need to think about what we’re comfortable with doing. Set up some boundaries.”

“Eds, honestly, whatever you’re comfortable with is fine with me. I swear I’m not being difficult,” Richie said, when Eddie opened his mouth. “I’m being serious. I already told you, I want what you want.”

“Okay, well, then here’s what _I’m_ comfortable with,” Eddie said. “Telling you what to do, that’s fine, I’m cool with that—”

“That’s a normal day at the Tozier-Kaspbrak residence. You’re an expert in instruction already, bab-ey.”

“—but I’m not comfortable like, saying mean stuff. I don’t know if I can call you names, you know? That porno shit.” Eddie made a face, deepening his voice into a low, gravelly sound. “ _Yeah, take it, you dumb bitch, you cockslut_.”

“Edward James Kaspbrak, where _have_ you been picking up this kind of language?”

Eddie went bright red but rolled his eyes. “Research?”

“Oh, sure. Yeah, I used to do that kind of _research_ too—”

“Anyway,” Eddie said, pointedly. “I think what you really want is to be told nice things, right? You like it when I tell you you’re being good.”

Richie shuddered, and it was his turn to go bright red. “Ohhh, jeez. Yeah, fuck. Yeah, I do.”

“Then that’s how we’ll do it.”

“What’s the likelihood of you putting this whole fascinating document on pause so I can just suck your dick right now?”

“Zero,” Eddie said, with a slight smile. “There’s still items four through fourteen to go.”

Richie groaned. “Okay, hit me.”

\---

“Hold still.”

Richie hadn’t really considered the meaning of the word _hold_ when he’d been told that before. It was something people said to him over and over as a kid, when he was messing around in class, or in the barber’s chair trying to get his hair cut, a tired plea from a parent or teacher to get him to stop doing whatever he was doing. But right now, he was suddenly, vividly, sharply aware of the effort needed to do just that – to _hold_ , muscles tensed over the vibrating desperation shaking at the core of him, trying to keep a mental grip on every intrusive thought that bullet-pinged in a racket inside his brain, saying, _get up_ , saying _move_ , saying _do a little song and dance_ , saying the opposite of what he was being told to do. He was _holding on_ , to his body, to the thoughts in his head, to his breath.

Eddie brought the collar up to Richie’s neck, frowning in concentration, and looped it around to bring the two ends together at the front, gently feeding the leather through the buckle. Richie heard the clink of the metal rings as Eddie adjusted its position.

They were in their bedroom, still fully clothed, though they’d decided on sweatpants and t-shirts for comfort while they took Richie’s collar for a test drive. It was Eddie’s idea that Richie wear it around the apartment for a little while, just to get used to the feel of it.

Richie had agreed, for logistical purposes, since it made sense to try something out before committing to using it, but he’d started to regret it as soon as Eddie approached him, the sharp slope of his nose blurring the closer he leaned in, the wide-soft brown of his eyes taking up all of Richie’s vision. It was a fucking lot, on a sensory level, and he felt like one big exposed nerve as the stiff-leather feel of the collar settled in against his neck. It was meant to be a dry run, but already his breath was punching out of him in irregular huffs, already his skin was prickling, the hairs on his arms rising like Eddie was a buzzing charge of static electricity, and already he felt a hot, heavy clench in his gut.

“Breathe,” Eddie said, and Richie expelled all the air in his lungs, shoulders dropping. Eddie hooked a finger inside the collar, testing the give. “Too tight?”

His finger was directly under Richie’s chin, knuckle pressing up and into his Adam’s apple. He could pull on it, and Richie would have to follow down, wherever Eddie wanted him to go. Richie swallowed, and he felt it contract between the wedge of Eddie’s finger and the collar around his throat. “Fine,” he managed.

“It looks good.” Eddie smiled, his anxious eyebrows knitting together into something a little cautious, a little pleased. “See how you go for a couple hours, check that it doesn’t get sore.”

It didn’t get sore, Richie found, though it wasn’t exactly getting put through its paces. It rested, a barely-there weight that he was never able to stop noticing, because of how it shifted and sat against his skin, every time he turned his head or leaned back, cool at first and then warming up, a slight sweat-stickiness growing underneath, creating a clammy ring around his neck.

He wanted to feel it, to run his fingers round it, but every time he raised a hand, he lowered it again. He didn’t know what was stopping him. He was a compulsive fiddler, usually, spinning a pen between his fingers and clicking it in rapid-fire snicks whenever he was in a writing room, until one of the other writers couldn’t stand the relentless fidgeting anymore and snapped out a _put the fucking pen down, Tozier!_ Or he’d be drumming his left hand on the table while he typed one-fingered on his laptop with his right, until Eddie peered over at him to say, with a wry kind of smile, _didn’t Mavis Beacon teach you anything?_

He managed to get a bit of writing done, researched a few things to make sure he was getting his references right, got distracted falling down a Wikipedia hole reading articles on Olympic javelin-throwing statistics, wisely avoided logging onto Twitter in case he cracked any accidentally-revealing jokes about being tied to his desk, and otherwise managed to suffer two hours of a constant, low-grade reminder about the thing around his neck without any drama.

And then, “Shall we take it off?” Eddie said, when the two hours were up, leaning against the doorframe. And there was something about the casual cant of his hips, the cross of his arms over his chest, that suddenly felt unbearable to Richie. He looked so _good_ , he almost glowed, like a fucking beacon in the bright overspill of daylight from the wide kitchen windows, and Richie wanted to do something fucking ridiculous, like slide off his chair to the ground right there and then, and drag himself on his hands and knees to Eddie’s feet.

“Um,” Richie said, his voice a dry click in his throat. He needed to remember to drink more water.

Eddie looked at him carefully, and Richie felt himself squirm a little under the scrutiny. There were so many dumb things, jokes and diversions and deflections, queued up in a jostling, congested line-up on his tongue, ready to spill out and disperse into the tight, empty sound of hanging silence. But he couldn’t bring out a single fucking one.

Eddie walked over to him, and put a warm hand on his shoulder. Richie almost rocked directly into his space, like a magnet unstoppably drawn to latch onto the source of its pull, but stopped just short, feeling his breath tight in his chest. “You did good,” Eddie said, quietly. “I’ll take it off you for now, okay?”

“Yeah,” Richie said, and he tried to laugh, feeling ridiculous, but the sound was too high and breathy and it made his stomach flip even to hear himself.

Eddie’s fingers were soft and deft at his neck, and then the collar was off. Richie’s hand floated up to the line where a slightly damp line of sweat was now cooling, sharply bare suddenly in the open air. He touched the skin. It didn’t feel any different to normal, but the beat of his pulse under there was rapid, fluttering, anxious.

And then Eddie was drawing Richie into his chest, standing over him, and Richie twisted awkwardly where he was sat on the couch to press his nose right into Eddie’s sternum, wrapping his arms tight around Eddie’s waist, breathing him in, squeezing tight while he felt his own heartbeat slow.

“Ho-o-o-o-ly fuck,” Richie said, eventually, mumbled into the damp heat of Eddie’s t-shirt. He leaned back and looked up. “Well, that was fucking something, huh?”

“Yeah.” Eddie stroked his hair. “It sure was.”

Not long after, Eddie was in Richie’s lap, bracing his knees on the outside of Richie’s thighs, leaning down to kiss him, pulling his head back gently by the hair. Richie’s neck arched over the back of the couch while Eddie moaned into his mouth and dug his thumb into the hollow of Richie’s jaw, grinding down against him. 

“So hot,” Eddie murmured against Richie’s lips. “You’re so hot, Richie – _fuck_ – you make me crazy, you know that?”

“Uh-huh,” Richie mumbled back, though he wasn’t really answering the question, more distracted by the feel of Eddie’s cock, warm and damp through his sweatpants rubbing hard up against his own, the stuttering of their hips together, and the hot handful of Eddie’s ass he was holding onto.

“Fuckin’ crazy, for real, I want you all the time – fuck, I can’t wait – I can’t wait—”

“What?” Richie said, blurrily, letting Eddie kiss a trail across his cheek, his jaw, his neck, nipping as he went. “Oh fuck,” he said, weakly, as he felt Eddie’s teeth graze the place where the collar had been before. His cock jerked, leaking, but he couldn’t bring himself to stop grinding them together, couldn’t take even one moment to cleave the two of them apart to shove his pants down. “Can’t – wait – what? Eds, _uhhn_ , tell me—”

“Can’t wait to get it back on you, _christ_ , can’t wait to fuck you in it, can’t wait to make you feel so good—”

“God,” Richie groaned out, pressing his hot-open mouth to Eddie’s chest, grappling desperately at the back of him to bring them closer together, hips jerking. “God, Eddie, I love you, I fucking love you—”

“I love you too, so much, fuck—”

Richie came on a sob, gasping, spilling wetly in his pants, and Eddie followed not far behind, gasping _Richie, Richie, Richie_ as he twitched and groaned and rutted in Richie’s lap, moaning long and final as he dropped his head onto Richie’s shoulder.

They were sweaty and sticky, and Richie’s back was starting to twinge from the angle, but they clung to each other a little longer, quiet and breathing soft together in the afternoon sun.


	4. Chapter 4

Richie had asked Eddie if their Main Event, an emphasis that was clearly capitalized, was going to be a surprise or not, if Eddie was going to _Officer-and-a-Gentleman_ -him out of the kitchen and into the bedroom one moonlit evening when he was the least expecting it and ravish him there and then. Richie kind of liked the idea of being caught unawares without time to overthink it, but Eddie dismissed it, because, “one, you’ll get super worked up waiting if you don’t know when it’s coming, and two, if you think I’m surprising your grody unwashed ass without proper prep first you can think again.”

Richie blinked. “It’s really great how I don’t take your germaphobia personally,” he said. He didn’t – not really, but sometimes Eddie’s particular brand of viciousness burrowed awkwardly under the thick skin he’d built up for other people. Sometimes, both his and Eddie’s jokes came a little too close to the mark.

“I know. Hey,” Eddie said, and he scrunched a hand into the fabric of Richie’s t-shirt apologetically. “I don’t think your ass is grody, I promise. I love your ass. But it’s still an ass.”

“An ass is an ass is an ass,” Richie said, sighing. “So, when am I pencilling in the Grand Finale? I’m warning you, my social calendar fills up real quick.”

They hadn’t picked a day. Eddie kept adding to his work-in-progress Sex Document with amendments and caveats over what they would or wouldn’t do. Richie’s suggestions were pretty simple, (“just don’t come in my eyes, anywhere else is fair game,”) but Eddie kept asking questions anyway, trying to corral Richie’s evasive wisecracks into something that seemed suspiciously like he was trying to make him accountable.

They’d settled on a safeword, too, after Eddie had vetoed Richie’s original choice of _spacejam_ , (“if you say it fast enough it’s one word,”) on account of the fact that Richie obviously didn’t realise that he _might actually need to use it_ , and it would suck if one of his all-time favourite movies was forever associated with a bad experience. Richie was kind of quiet after Eddie pointed it out, and he came back the next day, slightly chastened, and suggested an unsentimental _monkfish_ instead.

Still, even with all the planning, and the fine-tuning of their terms and conditions, they didn’t seem to be getting any closer to actually _doing_ it. Every time Richie asked, Eddie just said, “Soon,” and then busied himself with something else.

It was driving Richie crazy.

“Okay,” he said, after two weeks of strictly vanilla blowjobs and the occasional handjob in the shower, which was all well and good except for how the waiting for _more_ was giving Richie a gnawing, embarrassed anxiousness that sat like a football in his gut. “Give me your phone.”

“Uh.” Eddie handed it over. “Why?”

“Because.” Richie fiddled with it, entering the passcode, then opened up Eddie’s Google Calendar. _Kinky sex with Richie_ , he typed in as a new appointment for the next day, a Saturday, which he scheduled optimistically from 4pm onwards after _lunch date with Miranda_. He handed the phone back to Eddie. “I hope that’s not synced with your work’s G-Cal, by the way.”

“No, why, what did you—” Eddie looked at the screen. “Oh.”

“Is tomorrow alright? Any other pressing sexual engagements that might conflict I need to know about?”

“Rich, I’m not sure – I’ve been so busy with work this week, I didn’t have time to read this article on—”

“No, fuck the article!” Richie said, suddenly. “No more articles!” He pointed at Eddie’s laptop which was open on the table with sixteen tabs queued up on his browser titled things like _How to Make a Safeword Truly Safe_ , and _Dom in Doubt: Is Domming Really For You?_ and _Crossing the Line: Can Kink Become Abuse?_ “We have to just _do it_. We’re making it weird! We can’t overthink it! It’s like parenthood.”

“I – how is it like parenthood?”

“I mean you can prepare all you want but that baby’s still got a due date! It’s coming no matter what! At one point you gotta say fuck the books, I’m gonna wing it!”

Eddie stared back at Richie. “You know that goes against everything I believe in.”

“I know.” Richie slumped and crouched down beside Eddie, propping his crossed arms over Eddie’s lap. “But – this feels like stalling. Like, either we just go ahead and _do_ it, or we agree that it was a stupid idea and we never talk about it again.”

“No, come on.” Eddie cupped Richie’s face, thumb scrubbing up against the grain of stubble. “I want to. I swear. It’s in the calendar, now, right?” He sat back, and reached over to close his laptop. “I’m sorry I – Tomorrow. I promise.”

“Tomorrow,” Richie repeated, firmly. Eddie’s hands tentatively came back to pet his hair, and Richie pushed up into it, letting out a low, soft breath.

\---

When Saturday came, it dawned bright and unremarkable and ordinary.

Eddie went for a run first thing, like he usually did, and Richie lay in bed with a coffee and his laptop, browsing Twitter idly, like he usually did. Everything was normal, except for the way Richie’s heart was beating in irregular little pulses in his chest, making it hard to concentrate. After half an hour of re-reading the same sentence four times while his guts did ungraceful gymnastics in his belly, he figured he should probably leave the coffee and get out of bed.

“Will you – get ready, while I’m out?” Eddie said meaningfully, a couple of hours later, as he zipped up his jacket to go out on a lunch date with a pregnant work colleague whose name Richie had completely forgotten because he was focusing instead on the blush that was blooming delightfully on Eddie’s chiselled cheekbones. “I’ll be home by like, three-thirty, and then I can shower when I get back and we can, y’know. Get going.”

“Yup,” Richie said, landing with a hard pop on the _p_ , baring his teeth in a grin. “Don’t worry. This ass’ll be clean as a whistle, fit as a fiddle, ship-shape and ready for sailing by the time you get back, cap’n.”

Eddie shook his head, chin dipped like he was embarrassed, but he came forward to kiss Richie goodbye anyway. “And eat something, too. You’ll need to keep your energy levels up, okay, so don’t skip lunch. But don’t have anything too heavy, either—"

“I know, I _know_.”

Over the next couple of hours, Richie wrote a whole six words of his show and deleted four of them; listened to one and a half podcasts while half-heartedly attempting to toss together a salad consisting mainly of pistachio nuts and something leafy in a bag labelled _fenugreek_ before giving up and deciding toast would have to fucking do; shaved, shit, showered, scrubbed, and otherwise got as squeaky-fucking clean as he could possibly get short of washing his ass with disinfectant or actually using an enema which he’d briefly considered but had chickened out of after lingering too long in front of the disposables at CVS the week before.

He was just contemplating clothes versus no clothes when he heard the front door click. Richie’s heart jumped into his throat. Unthinking, he grabbed a towel and ran from the bathroom into the bedroom before he could bump into Eddie in the corridor.

He heard footsteps, then the hiss and hum of the shower pump. Richie’s heart beat loud in his ears. He walked in a little circle on the rug, jittery, then sat down on the bed. Goosebumps prickled over his skin as the flush heat of the shower evaporated off him, a tangle of nerves beginning to form in the pit of his stomach.

He waited, fiddling compulsively with his phone. He half considered writing Bev a text, _bout 2 get fucked in a collar, kinky amirite??? anyway hows the spring fashion line coming_ , then put it back down.

There was a knock at the door. Richie took his glasses from the bedside table and put them on. “Yeah,” he said.

Eddie walked into the bedroom. He was wearing a neat polo shirt tucked into his chinos, but his feet were bare against the carpet. He looked neat and well-pressed, inoffensively sweet, almost, with his fresh-washed hair, cheeks pinking from the warmth of the shower. He stopped at the foot of their bed, looking at Richie who was sat back against the headboard, naked, except for the towel at his waist. “You been waiting for me?”

Richie swallowed. The air seemed to have gotten thinner, sucked out of the room as soon as Eddie had opened the door. “Yeah,” he said.

“What did you get up to?”

“Oh. You know.” Richie huffed out a laugh. “Listened to a podcast. Ruined a salad.”

“Did you touch yourself?”

Richie’s stomach dropped. “Uh.” He cut a glance to Eddie who was watching him, looking all calm and placid – but there was a deep, magnetic undercurrent to his stillness, like something dark under the surface of a glassy lake, and it made Richie wet his lips and swallow hard. “No,” he said.

“Good,” Eddie said, and Richie let out a breath. “I was thinking about you. This afternoon. Couldn’t stop thinking about you. About this.” He ran his eyes appraisingly over Richie. “Were you thinking about it too?”

“Fuck yeah.” Richie didn’t trust his voice beyond one-syllable words right then. There was something anticipatory in the air, warm and electric, and it made Richie’s spine feel like fucking rubber, like hot liquid broiling low in his belly.

“Fuck yeah,” Eddie repeated, teasing. “Are you ready?”

Richie only nodded. His mouth was dry. He should have drunk more water.

“Okay. Stand up. And drop the towel.” Eddie’s voice was soft, a minimal disturbance in the noiseless room, but his words were firm, and Richie couldn’t fucking help the way it made his stomach flip over itself. Richie stood, and the towel slipped from his grip, gathering damp and rough at his feet.

Eddie looked pleased, his face turning pinker than before. He bent to rustle in the top drawer of Richie’s bedside table, where there were condoms and lube and the handful of parking tickets Richie still needed to pay. When he turned back, Eddie was holding the collar in his hands. Richie felt his heartbeat ramp up a few notches, an anxious buzz of adrenaline and anticipation cocktailing in his veins. _Shit_ , he thought. _Shit, shit, shit. Here we fucking go_.

“I’m going to put it on you, now,” Eddie said, and now his voice had a harder edge to it, a convincing kind of confidence, maybe for himself, maybe for Richie. “Once it’s on, don’t speak, unless I tell you to. You can nod or shake your head. And you can say your safeword if you need to. You remember it?”

Richie nodded. He felt a little like he was caught in the freefall of a missed step on a staircase, a lurch in his stomach that wasn’t coming back down.

“Say it to me.”

Richie quirked a small smile. “Monkfish.”

“Okay.” Eddie stepped forward, and then his hands were deft and warm at Richie’s neck, tucking the collar’s tongue into the cool buckle that sat at Richie’s throat. He gave it a short, gentle tug, then checked the space between the leather and Richie’s Adam’s apple with his fingers.

It wasn’t instantaneous – Richie didn’t feel like he was ready to roll over and fucking beg as soon as the collar was on, but he could feel _something_ starting; a prickling creeping over his scalp, raising the hair on his arms, a wanting ache beginning to seep into his muscles, and the feeling of something being pushed back inside himself. It was a weird feeling – not _good_ yet, but strong, and a bit overwhelming.

Eddie peered up at Richie. “Does it feel okay? Nod or shake.”

Richie nodded. The collar bit into the top of his clavicle as he did.

“Good.” Without breaking eye contact, Eddie stepped back and settled on the bed, perched on the edge with his feet planted square on the floor. His legs were slightly apart, and his hands rested just above each thigh, lax on the crease of his pants. “Stand up straight,” he said. “Let me look at you.”

Blood thumping hot and leaden in his legs, in his arms, in his throat, Richie tried to straighten up, palms clammy by his sides. Eddie’s eyes roamed, down over Richie’s chest, his belly, his thighs, down to his feet.

“Now turn around,” Eddie said.

Richie turned, slowly, less to put on a show and more because he felt strange and clumsy, like moving was an effort he couldn’t make without specific instruction, without encouragement. He tried to peer over his shoulder at Eddie, but the collar was thick and inflexible around his neck, and he felt it scrape his chin. Arousal sat heavy in his belly. His cock twitched against his thigh.

“Shit,” he heard Eddie say. When Richie turned back around, Eddie’s hand was rubbing the line of his cock through his pants. “You look so fucking hot, god.” He let out a small sound as he ground the heel of his hand into his crotch, before he pulled his hand away. “Fuck. Okay. Can you get on your knees in front of me?”

Richie went down fast, one knee at a time. There was a wincingly-loud crack that made him want to laugh, to say something about his old fucking joints, about their collapsing, geriatric bones, but Eddie’s face was set, his gaze heated in a way that made Richie’s urge to laugh fade right out.

“Here.” There was a clinking noise, and then Eddie was holding the leash out, with its clip for the collar, its reinforced leather handhold already wrapped around Eddie’s fist. “I’m going to put it on you now, okay?”

Richie wanted to let out a sound of assent, something quiet and contained and normal, only the noise that came out of him was something else completely, something strange and raw, a needful gasp of air over a deeply guttural wanting sound, an embarrassment to his own ears. He felt himself go red, a fierce burn that prickled under the fresh-shaved sensitivity of his cheeks.

He heard the metal clack of the leash clipping onto the ring of his collar. He felt the tug as Eddie drew the leash in, gentle, insistent, and when he looked up again, he saw Eddie, gathering the leather in his hand, wrapping it in a loop down over his forearm, round his elbow and back up again, keeping it taut, pulling Richie in further and further until his face was in Eddie’s crotch, and he had to brace his hands on Eddie’s knees.

“Good,” Eddie said, and Richie moaned a tight little moan behind his teeth, breathing hard, nosing up against the stiff line of Eddie’s dick. “I want you to suck it,” Eddie said, his voice short. “Unzip me. Put it in your mouth. And don’t touch yourself.”

The instructions rattled about in Richie’s head – do this, don’t do that, get it right, behave, _concentrate_. He reached up and dragged the zip down on Eddie’s pants, a loud, static crackle in the stillness of the room. Clumsily, he pawed at the fabric of Eddie’s underwear, tented and wet-smeared, until he managed to push it down, drawing out Eddie’s cock, flesh-hot and hard, into his mouth.

“God, _yes_.” Eddie bucked, and Richie dropped his hands to his thighs. Eddie still had the leash wrapped around his right forearm, black leather cutting tight into the white of his skin, and with his other hand he held the back of Richie’s head. “Fuck, yeah, _yes_ ,” Eddie moaned, soft, then louder as Richie sucked hard with a slurping nose, glasses fogging as his head bobbed up and down. “Feels so good, Richie, love it when – _ah_ – love your mouth on me, _fuck_ —”

Richie’s jaw ached, and there was a constant, throbbing pressure at his neck where the collar pulled, but nothing felt important enough to notice, not the soreness of his lips or the numbness of his bent legs, not even the hard, leaking line of his own cock. He opened up, wide as he could, breathing hard through his nose, through the ache.

“God, _y-yeah_ , so good, you’re _so good_ —”

With a keening noise, Richie tried to go even further down, as far as he could go. Then Eddie’s cock hit the ring of muscle at the back of his throat, and he coughed and choked, an explosive gagging noise, eyes watering and stinging. Eddie quickly relinquished the hold on the leash, and eased Richie back.

“Shit,” Eddie said, and his eyes were bright and his neck was flushed high and his cock was wet and shiny, dripping with spit and precome in a slow, seeping stain at the hem of his shirt. He took a breath that visibly expanded his chest, and let it out slow.

Richie’s lips felt hot and swollen, and his throat ached with a scraping feeling. He could feel saliva drying sticky and cool on his chin. His cock fucking throbbed. Eddie just stared at Richie, glassy-eyed, and Richie stared back, a weird kind of ringing in his ears, mouth red-sore and empty. Then Eddie cupped Richie’s jaw, thumb smearing over his lips before pushing in and saying, in a soft voice, “Suck.”

Richie closed his eyes and sucked on Eddie’s thumb. The smooth pad of it was small in his mouth, the slim-bone knuckle-bend of it pressing lightly on his tongue, and there was something about the delicacy of it, how small it felt after the big, rigid cock that had been there moments ago, that made Richie’s heart swell and fill with a sharp emotion. He wanted Eddie’s thumb to stay there, safe and warm in the cavern of his mouth.

Eddie pulled it away. He put his hands on either side of Richie’s face, touching gently. “Hey,” he said. “You want me to fuck you, now?”

Richie drew a breath in, sharp and wet. There weren’t really any words left in the sludge-thick sluice of arousal that had filled his brain. He couldn’t say yes, he didn’t want to say no. Moving at all felt weird, like all the air had gathered up around him in a thick, warm fog, cocooning him, like if he moved he would disturb something, shift all the molecules out of the way and mess up the space around them. He nodded.

“Okay.” Eddie crouched down, and said, “Up you get.” Without waiting for an answer, he scooped his arms around Richie’s waist, and lifted him to balance up on his knees. Then, with gentle encouragement, got Richie to lift one leg, then the other, before guiding him, heavy and clumsy, to sit on the bed.

Eddie leaned down and put a hand on each of Richie’s thighs, rubbing the feeling back into them. The massage felt good, soothing away the ache, but the drag of Eddie’s fingers up close to the valley between his legs where his cock was hard and leaking made Richie shake with the effort not to twist and try to get Eddie to rub him there, where he needed it most. A noise came out of his throat.

Eddie stepped back. His lips were wet and shiny, like he’d been biting them. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

Eddie took his clothes off, piece by piece, tugging his shirt up over his head, leaving his half-dried hair stuck up like duck-fluff at the back. The scars that he hadn’t let Richie touch for months sprawled in jagged interruptions over his chest and shoulder, silvery-pale against his skin. Richie stared, heated, but Eddie only blushed, lip quirking sideways, as he shucked off his pants, dropping them to the floor in a neat pile. Then he came to stand in front of Richie, and gathered the leash back up in his hands.

Richie straightened, just a little. Eddie tipped Richie’s head back with a finger. “Get on the bed. Lie on your back.”

Richie shuffled back and lay down, past the point of trying not to look desperate, or of even having the presence of mind to think about acting any kind of way at all, except the way Eddie wanted him to.

“Bend your legs. Up to your chest. And hold on.”

Eddie got up on the bed in front of Richie and pressed against his shins, pushing back until Richie’s legs were bent to his chest, hands gripped just below his knees. It had the effect of squeezing Richie’s breath right out of him, both from the fact that the hunched angle compressed his lungs under his own weight, but also from the way it bared his whole ass, opening himself up.

“Shit,” Eddie said, softly. He rubbed a hand over Richie’s backside, fingers digging into the meat of it. Then he threw Richie a look, nervous, almost, before he said, “Good boy.”

Richie almost swallowed his fucking tongue as he jerked back, hot and shocked, but he was stopped by the tug of the leash. His cock pulsed, pearling wet at the tip, and it leaked down all the way to the crack of his ass.

Eddie’s fingers followed, stroking, down to the furl of Richie’s hole, pressing gently with his thumb. He was staring down between Richie’s legs, lips parted. When he looked back up, his gaze was dark, unyielding, like he’d made a decision, and Richie wasn’t going to be consulted on it. “Gonna put my fingers in you.”

Richie tried to nod, but Eddie’s fist was still tight on the leash, no slack to the taut line. It wasn’t cutting Richie’s air, but he still felt breathless, shocked by the control exerted over him, so turned on it almost hurt. He was going to take it; whatever Eddie had to give him. He _wanted_ to take it.

Eddie relaxed the hold on the leash, slipping it around his wrist, getting Richie to lower his head down to the pillow. Then there was the click and splurt of lube in a bottle as Eddie squeezed it onto his fingers, loud and comical in the quiet room, only Richie couldn’t have felt less like laughing, feeling nothing but a wordless, keening desperation.

When Eddie’s finger nudged up against his hole, Richie jumped, head jerking up to look down his chest, between his legs, where Eddie was kneeling, concentrating. He pushed the tip in, and Richie shook, sweat-damp palms slipping where he held his legs apart, aching everywhere, in his thighs, in the juncture of his hips, in his ass.

“Okay?” Eddie said, rubbing slowly, around the rim, scarcely inside, a hot, tight little motion, teasing like he was tickling a fucking kitten under its chin, the barest crook of a first knuckle.

Richie blew out a breath which tailed off into a sharp, grunted exhalation as Eddie’s finger suddenly slid in a little deeper, then retracted, only to fuck back in again, a smooth, twisting press like he was trying to feel Richie from the inside. The sounds were wet in the quiet room, squelching noises increasing as Eddie poured a little more lube, one-handed, onto the place where his finger disappeared inside, moving gently, slowly. Richie could hear his heartbeat in his ears, could feel the throbbing in his cock, and he covered his face with his arms, mouth open against his bicep as he bit hard to muffle his whining.

“Stop that,” Eddie said, and his other hand tugged the leash, and Richie immediately put his hands back onto his knees. “I wanna watch your face.” With that, he unfurled a second finger to push in tight next to the first, and Richie moaned, face uncovered and neck bared, taking it all as Eddie fingered him open.

When Eddie was up to three fingers, corkscrewing them in and out of Richie’s sore and stretched ass, nudging up every few thrusts onto his prostate, pushing hiccupping gasps out of him each time, Richie was a mess. His belly was wet and slick from his dripping cock, and he was sweating so badly he could feel the sheets turning damp underneath him, a hot-cold flow of perspiration that dried cool on his skin just as a new wave of heat bloomed over him every time Eddie shoved in deep and relentless.

He was going to come from this. Trapped between the hard, ungiving press of Eddie’s knuckles deep in his ass, and the tense line of the leash tugging at his neck, he could feel a bright, hot feeling building at the core of him, between his legs, all the way down his fucking spine. He wanted to shout, wanted to tell Eddie, but Eddie hadn’t told him to speak yet, and he felt like all his words had dried up, anyway, his brain a rubbed-out slate with nothing but dust left on it, a formless kind of desperation that he couldn’t verbalise.

And then Eddie did it for him. “Gonna make you come on my fingers,” he said, pushing in and out, angling slightly, finding Richie’s prostrate and pressing hard against it, making Richie jerk and wail, unable to hold back. “And then I’m going to roll you over and fuck you and it’s going to feel so good. You want that? Want to be good for me?” He leaned down, between Richie’s legs, pressing them into his chest with his body, bending him in half, and he turned his head to kiss a wet, open-mouthed kiss to Richie’s knee. “You can talk, if you want.”

“Y-yeah, _yes_ ,” Richie hissed out, the angle tilting his hips up, lifting his ass, getting Eddie deeper, a hot muddle of raw intimacy with the wet feeling of Eddie’s beckoning fingers inside him, the press of their bodies. “ _Please_ , oh, ohhfuck, Eddie, t-touch me, I’m close, I’m—”

With his other hand, the one clutching the leash, Eddie took Richie’s cock. The leather band rubbed up against him, hot and smooth but rougher than skin, and Richie jerked with a broken howl, pushed suddenly and shockingly over the edge, gasping and pumping his hips to chase the feeling, clamping hard onto Eddie’s fingers, trying to draw out the friction on his dick as it twitched and spurted against his stomach.

“Holy fuck,” Eddie whispered, and he slowly drew his fingers out. When Richie peered up, shakily, he saw that Eddie was trembling, and his cock was hard and flushed dark. “I – I’m not gonna last long, fuck. Can you turn over?”

Richie’s body still felt like it was rippling with shock, like seismic waves were running up through him, and he wasn’t going to say _no_ , ever, wasn’t going to stop Eddie from doing anything to him; he needed it, _needed_ Eddie to feel as good as Richie was feeling now, needed Eddie to use him up and take what he wanted, so that Eddie would be happy, satisfied, pleased.

Richie got onto his hands and knees with some difficulty, shaking with a kind of weakness in his muscles that had only ever come before from the soreness of doing ill-advised and sporadic weightlifting reps on bored afternoons because he knew watching his arms flex drove Eddie wild, more than for any fitness reasons. But right now, he’d never felt so undone, so unglued, his ass still stretched open, his head a scattered, beatific, white-noise soundscape of nothing but a thumping feeling of _want_.

He felt hands pull his glasses gently off his face. Then he heard the rip of a condom packet, and the soft exhale of a breath, and he waited, limbs trembling, the length of the leash draped across his back.

When Eddie pressed in, it was still a shock, the bluntness of it, but the press felt inexorable, something his body wasn’t going to fight against. It wasn’t a new feeling; he’d done it before with other guys, forgettable trysts and anonymous hook-ups – but back then, there’d always been a fight-or-flight response he’d had to tamp down, a twinge of good old-fashioned shame and repression that stopped him from getting joyfully railed to his heart’s content. And the secrecy of those moments never felt illicit in a sexy way. It was the kind of secret that just made him feel gross, and kind of tired, and never satisfied.

But Eddie – Eddie loved him, and wanted him, and he didn’t want Richie to hide, or pretend, and he wanted to _know_ him. And despite everything they’d been through, and everything Richie _was_ , Eddie was still there, with him, inside him, unrelenting, giving Richie what he wanted, and taking what he wanted at the same time, a symbiotic coming together that made Richie’s heart brim over as much as it plucked the still-vibrating strings of his arousal.

He moaned, mouth open in a wet smear against the pillow, knees slipping apart, giving in to that sharp, raw, over-stimulated feeling, trying to wring out the wet, jumbled sponge of his brain and focus on _taking_ it _._

“Richie, Richie, _Richie_ ,” Eddie was whispering, punctuating his stream of hisses with the rapid-fire pump of his hips, pelvic bones connecting with Richie’s ass. Richie could feel the rhythmic tug of the leash on the collar, contracting convulsively against his throat. Every time Eddie thrust _in_ a spark of electricity freckled across his skin. It was like he’d been destroyed in a video game, dispersed into scattered, disconnected pixels, and Eddie was fucking him back into corporeality. “Feels so good, God, you feel so fuckin’ good, taking it so well, being so good for me—”

The praise fell over Richie like he was being blanketed in falling snowflakes, melting against the searing heat of his skin, trickling into every open part of him. He was covered with it, thrumming inside and out, warm with encouragement, desperately pleased. With a groan he shoved his hips back, squeezing his aching muscles, trying to draw Eddie closer.

“Ohffff _fuck_ ,” Eddie whined, and he bent forward, down over Richie’s back, hands skimming the sweat-slick planes from his spine to his shoulders, fucking his hips faster as he got closer to the edge. “C-close, I’m gonna come, I’m—” And he reached forward, clumsy and desperate, until his fingers hooked in under the collar at the back of Richie’s neck, holding on tight. “ _Yes_ , ohgod, s-so good, baby, sweetheart, _Richie_ —”

And with a slam of his hips, Eddie came, moaning, gasping unintelligibly in Richie’s ear, hands squeezing and stroking and touching Richie all over, and Richie felt hot, and blissful, shuddering hard as Eddie jerked inside him, then fell still.

Richie was floating. He was lightheaded, drifting like he was slipping half into sleep, waking up only to notice the stretched-out soreness of his ass when Eddie pulled out.

He felt a little pressure as Eddie unclipped the leash, and then Eddie’s hands were on him, soft and coaxing, easing him into his back. Richie only had a moment to blink confusedly at the blurry ceiling before Eddie’s head was coming into view as he leaned over and gently unbuckled the collar.

As it slipped off, leaving his neck bare, Richie felt a strange lurch in his stomach. He felt like a puppet with its strings cut, suddenly undone. A creeping sensation overcame him, like the full weight of his own skin was slowly, inexorably wrapping back around him, and the feeling crawled up with the same maliciousness as apprehension, as embarrassment, as fear.

Something swelled up in his throat and he realised with sudden guilt that he was about to cry. He shoved his hands up onto his face before he crumpled, hiding the ugly grimace under his palms as he breathed hard and squeezed his eyes shut against the tears, but they sprang out anyway, streaming hotly down his face as he gritted his teeth.

“Hey, hey, it’s okay, you’re okay,” Eddie said, and he crawled up and onto Richie, laying down on top of him, body pressed tight across the whole length of him, all warm flesh and sweat-damp limbs. He burrowed his head under Richie’s chin, kissing his neck and chest, rubbing his nose against Richie’s jaw, his collarbone. “You’re good. I love you so much. It’s okay, it’s okay.”

Richie choked out some awful noises, unattractive snorting sounds and wet gasps as he shook and shuddered. Eventually, he quieted to a few sniffs, breathing shakily.

“You okay?” Eddie asked, after a moment.

“Mm,” Richie said, not trusting himself to open his mouth just yet, in case the nonsense that had got temporarily blasted out of his brain from the feeling of Eddie fucking him into submission and the subsequent car-crash of feelings came tumbling back out in a hectic, unprocessed mess; _want to do this forever, want to give you all of me, want to be yours, want to keep you, want you to keep me, don’t want to do anything except make you happy, all the time, the rest of my life—_

“Hey.” Eddie got an elbow on Richie’s sternum to prop himself up. “Lemme see you.”

Richie moved his hands away and looked down, bleary without his glasses and unfocused through the thick smear of puffy, watery eyes. His face must have been a real sight, red and blotchy and sticky and Richie was glad he couldn’t see properly so that he could kid himself into thinking Eddie couldn’t see the full HD-detail of his embarrassing breakdown either.

Eddie blew out a breath. “Better?”

“Not bad,” Richie managed, mush-mouthed. “Just a lot.”

“Okay.” Eddie sat up, gently, careful not to jostle too much. Richie felt the loss of him, but only in the way that he normally felt when Eddie got out of bed at the ass-crack of dawn, taking his warm, compact little body and the heat of it away from Richie in the freshness of the morning, not in a way like he was going to start crying again. Then Eddie carefully pulled up the covers and tucked them over Richie, over his chest and arms, patting the sides down gently to cocoon him. He was being so careful, so attentive, that Richie _did_ almost start crying again. “I’m just gonna wash my hands, I’ll be right back.”

Richie lay, waiting. He felt calmer – still a bit shaken, somehow, like maybe something fundamental had moved inside of him. But Richie had gotten used to seismic shifts in his worldview; it was just another thing to process, to slot in the messy jigsaw of his life. There were probably a lot of parts still missing, and maybe over his lifetime he’d acquired a piece or two from a different puzzle entirely, so it was never going to make a perfect picture, but at least he had the satisfaction of knowing that somehow, somewhere, the pieces of him were part of some kind of whole.

When Eddie came back, he also had a washcloth and a glass of water, which he made Richie drink all of before wiping him down gently. He also had a small tube of cream that he took from his bedside table, and he said, “Okay?” quietly, before rubbing it into his hands, warming it, and then putting his fingertips to Richie’s throat. He massaged, slow and careful, eyebrows drawn tight together in concentration, skimming up the line of his neck to the underside of his jaw and back down again, until there was nothing left to rub in, and he was just trailing his hands over Richie’s skin in a languid, repetitive motion.

“Makin’ me sleepy,” Richie eventually huffed out.

“Does it hurt?” Eddie said, thumb brushing over the bump of Richie’s Adam’s apple.

“Nah.” Richie felt a small, pleasant shiver run over him. “Feels nice.”

Eddie grinned, eyebrows inverting from a knotted furrow to a fond, slanted angle that usually meant he was relieved. He was like a muppet, with his big, wide eyes and expressive brows, and Richie liked how he could read Eddie like that, could figure him out, understand him, without having to second-guess, without needing to make quick glancing checks over his shoulder all the time. He could just _be_.

The emotional fragility of the sexual aftermath was making him sappy. “You’re like the Bert to my Ernie,” he said, reaching out to smooth his thumb right in the middle of Eddie’s forehead, where the creases were.

Eddie caught Richie’s hand. “Did Ernie wear a leather collar? I don’t remember that particular episode of Sesame Street.”

“Yeah, well, I still don’t remember the majority of like, ’92 to 2001, so who knows what we missed out on back then. Although you probably dislodged at least six new memories for me today, just from fucking me like that.”

Eddie went a little red, and Richie wasn’t sure his heart would be able to keep brimming over with this much fondness, but it did. “So, uh. You liked it?” Eddie asked, and his fingers plucked at the bedspread.

“Um, yeah,” Richie said. “Sorry, did the bursting into tears and dumb comments about Sesame Street not communicate that?”

“No – I mean, yeah, that actually seems pretty on-brand. I should know by now when you start talking about muppets what you really mean is _thanks for fucking me so good_.” Eddie hesitated for a moment, like he was assessing Richie's fragility, but then barrelled on, “It’s – it _is_ kind of a shock, to see you cry like that, but, um. I’ve read enough articles now to know it can happen. Also, you’ll start crying at like, yoghurt commercials that use acapella choral versions of Fleetwood Mac songs, so I already know how easy you go off – that’s what she said,” he added, before Richie could.

Richie shut his open mouth. “You know me so well,” he said, and he meant it, with all the emotion in his dumb, overspilling heart. He opened out his arms. “C’mere?”

Eddie crawled up to lie on top of him, settling in with a sigh against Richie’s chest, hands running up and through the thicket of hair, making a small, satisfied noise as he pressed his lips to Richie’s collarbone. Richie brought his own hands up and looped them tight across Eddie’s back, marvelling at his solidity, the living fullness of him, kind and giving and brave enough to love Richie exactly as he was. Richie didn’t know which insane cosmic deity he needed to dial up to give praise to these days, but whichever one was in charge, whichever one had given him _this_ , that one was getting Richie’s sincerest mental high-fives until the end of time.

“Love you,” Eddie mumbled, sounding like he was minutes away from drifting off.

“Love you too, baby,” Richie said back, and his own eyes fell closed.

\---

When Bev said to Richie, “So, have you been behaving yourself?” a month later as she stepped into the apartment for the post-divorce, post-coming-out, housewarming party Eddie had invited everyone to, Richie let out a loud, hearty laugh, and said, “Oh, you _bet_ ,” with a wink as Eddie dropped Bev’s coat and scrambled, red-faced, to pick it back up.

“So we already made it to the making-double-entendres-in-front-of-your-friends part of the relationship,” Stan said dryly, tucking his and Patty’s jackets under his arm.

“What?” Richie said, taking Stan’s coats away from him and hanging them off the stairwell. “I’m just telling Bev what a great job Eddie’s been doing of keeping me on the straight and narrow since I moved in.”

“So to speak,” said Mike.

“Okay!” Eddie said loudly, shooing everyone out of the hallway. “I’m putting an embargo on double-entendres, single-entendres, innuendos, mom jokes, dad jokes, that’s-what-she-and/or-he-said jokes, and anything else relating to my or anyone else’s sex life for the rest of the evening.”

“Well, that’s eighty percent of Richie’s conversational topics gone,” said Ben.

“If you can _try_ to behave yourself,” Eddie said, a few minutes later, sternly, when he and Richie were in the kitchen alone pouring drinks, “I’ll put you in the collar and eat you out tonight.”

“Fuck!” Richie yelped as he knocked an entire glass of tonic water over, and it spilled in a rapidly-expanding pool of fizz across the countertop. “Eddie, what the _fuck_!”

Eddie winced and rubbed a finger over his nose, looking a little sheepish. “Sorry.” He handed Richie a dishcloth.

Richie mopped up the mess, his pulse still doing a jittery dance somewhere in his throat. He threw the wet rag in the sink. “Will you really?”

“Yeah,” Eddie said. He shrugged, and glanced at Richie sideways. “If you want me to?”

“Um, _yes_ ,” Richie said. “Yes, with fucking bells on, please and thank you.”

“How polite,” Eddie said, smiling. “Such good manners,” and he reached up to stroke Richie’s cheek, fond and casual. It had been half a joke, but Richie still took a sharp breath in as Eddie’s hand cupped his jaw, mouth parting half an inch, inadvertently. Eddie locked eyes with him. His thumb moved, slowly, to drag across Richie’s lips.

Richie shivered, overwhelmed by almost nothing. “ _Eddie_.”

“Ha,” Eddie said, out loud – not an exhalation or a huff of laughter, but the word, _ha_ , precisely-formed and a little embarrassed, a little pleased, as he stepped away, gathering himself. “Okay – I should – I’m going to bring the rest of the drinks in.” He picked up the tray of glasses, bumping the refrigerator door shut with his hip. He had a clean dishcloth slung over his shoulder, his hair was soft and slicked-back, and he looked every bit the confident, consummate host, easy and in control in his own environment, in a way he’d maybe always wanted to be. He moved towards the doorway, then looked back, expectant. “You coming?”

Richie cracked into a grin, then laughed, then drummed his hands against his thighs. “Yeah,” he said, feeling warmed to his heart and light as air in a way he’d maybe always wanted to be. “Yeah, I’ll be there.”

**Author's Note:**

> come say hi on [tumblr](https://www.focusfixated.tumblr.com)!


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